Can I Get a Witness? asks big questions about how far we’d go for the common good
First-time film actor Keira Jang takes a leading role in Vancouver director Ann Marie Fleming’s dark “satire” about a bucolic post-collapse future that comes with a catch
In Can I Get a Witness?, local actor Keira Jang plays a solemn teen in a future where life—quite literally—ends at 50.
Can I Get a Witness? opens March 14 at Fifth Avenue Cinemas
AT 25, KEIRA JANG has been told about impending environmental catastrophe for her entire life.
She belongs to the first generation in modern history that has been exposed since birth to a single and relentless message of certain doom. As if that’s not enough, she’s talking to Stir the day after the Lower Mainland has been rocked by the second unusually strong earthquake in as many weeks.
“I had no idea what happened but everyone was talking about it,” she laughs during a Zoom call from New West. “And I started earthquake preparing. Where am I gonna go? What’s my escape route? What am I gonna do with my cats? Then I Googled: ‘When’s the big one coming?’”
Google replied that the Big One is coming “in two weeks”. Bummer, but until then, we’re here to discuss a different apocalypse, namely the environmental chaos said to be precipitated by the Anthropocene age.
“I remember when I was in grade 3,” she begins, quite cheerfully, all things considered. “I did a project on climate change and that sent me on a spiral. ‘Oh my God, the world’s done!’ Ever since then I feel like it hasn’t really changed. Like you said, it’s all I’ve ever known, to be in this constant fear.”
It’s a discussion that’s very relevant to the young actor’s top-billed role in Can I Get a Witness?. Written and directed by Ann Marie Fleming, and shot in a sun-drenched Powell River, the film depicts a fairly bucolic post-collapse future where industry has ground to a halt, energy is strictly rationed, everyone rides a bike, and gardens far and wide are tended by humans who exist, we’re told, in a new world where poverty and inequality have been eradicated.
Sounds great, but of course there’s a catch. According to the brave new global constitution, known as “the Agreement”, life is mandated to end at 50, whereupon a fresh-faced youth arrives at the place of your choice, hands you a pain-free suicide kit, and bears witness as you off yourself for the Common Good.
Jang plays Kiah, a solemn teen learning the ropes in her first week as a professional Witness, mentored by the self-assured and unreasonably handsome Daniel (Joel Oulette). With digital media and film both things of the past, her job as a Documentor is to sketch the scene of each death. Back at home, meanwhile, Kiah’s mom Ellie (Sandra Oh) potters around preparing for her own goodbye ceremony.
From day one, Fleming told Jang that she’d written a “satire”, which holds true, arguably, until the film’s final scenes. Prior to that, Can I Get a Witness? maintains an ambivalent perspective on its future utopia. Kiah and Daniel encounter people who decidedly don’t approve of the new constitution. The film withholds any judgement.
There’s also something a little creepy about a group counselling session with fellow Witnesses. They speak like they’re in a cult. Kiah becomes our proxy when confronted with the hard realities of centrally planned human living (and dying)—an acting job that was confidently handed by Fleming to someone in their first-ever film.
“It was daunting, for sure,” Jang says with a grin. “It’s literally the first movie I’ve ever done. The most time I’d spent on set before that was maybe four days.” Her theatre background was handy, she adds, “so I just decided to treat it like that. But there was definitely a lot of imposter syndrome here and there. ‘Should I be doing this?’”
Jang more than ably does the job, which explains in part why Can I Get a Witness? was included in TIFF’s annual list of top 10 Canadian films. It also took five Vancouver Film Critic’s Circle Awards, including two for Fleming and one for Oh, along with Telefilm Canada’s One to Watch Award for Jang. She naturally gives credit to Fleming, who “set the bar for a what a director should be, for me.”
“She knew her world in and out,” Jang continues. “If I had a question, she had the answer. If she didn’t, it would be, ‘Let’s work through this together.’ She taught me that it could be collaborative. It was eye-opening to see that a director can trust you, and know what they’re doing, and be sure about what they want to make.”
Beyond that, it’s the viewer who needs to ponder what is modestly proposed in Can I Get a Witness?. We’ve recently blundered through a few years of ethical issues presented, right or wrong, as the common good. Behind the scenes, how did Jang and company see the Agreement? If she was Logan, would she run?
“Well yeah,” she scoffs. “I would get my mom and I together, we’d have a plan, I’d draw a map and figure out where we’re going to avoid the authorities. Actually, my girlfriend and I have kind of planned it out, where we’re gonna go. She has a cabin up in 100 Mile so, you know—we’re outta here!”
A little more seriously, Jang says: “It was a conversation that we had a lot on set. ‘What would you do? Would you go through with it?’ Most of us said no, this is not something we would ever agree to, but it does raise the question of what you would do, even coming down to sacrificing the convenience of Amazon purchases for shopping at a local business, you know? All those little things. Yes, this is the most drastic thing that you could sacrifice—your own life—but it made us think a lot more about the smaller, day-to-day things. And you always think ‘I’m one person, how much of an impact can I really make?’ But when you get more people thinking about that, and if we all just make these subtle little changes, even just having the awareness of it, I think, is really beneficial. ‘Okay, we would’t sacrifice this, but what could we do?’” 
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