Faith, Death, Nature: In Conversation With Ann Marie Fleming
- Hannah Tang
- Sep 25
- 8 min read
Ann Marie Fleming is a Canadian filmmaker and visual artist whose award-winning films play with visual mediums and have won the hearts of many. Her recent film, ‘Can I Get A Witness?’ was named on Toronto International Film Festival’s Canada’s Top Ten list in 2024. I was captivated by its heartfelt and thought-provoking charm, and was privileged enough to sit down with Ann Marie and dive into the heart of the film (albeit across time zones!).
I was really struck by your dramatic fiery opening, and then the epigraph of ‘a fable’. What message did you want to instill in the narrative and do you think that it's a cautionary tale, or a beacon of hope?
Oh, I love that because I think it is both. It is a cautionary tale and a beacon of hope. I wanted that documentary footage right at the top and it's of the Fort McMurray Fires in Northern BC back in 2016. But almost every country has seen those images in their country now. It’s a fable just because that's reality, but now we're going to tell a story about ‘how do we change that?’ — there’s also usually nature in a fable. You can take it more than one way: there is a message, it is telling a story, but it's not black and white, it gives you room for your own thoughts. It requires a suspension of disbelief, because no matter how real this looks, it is a thought experiment.
My second question was about the visuals of the film, because they're so stunning, so immersive and the scenes are just so rich. How did you go about translating your vision onto screen?
Well, that's the world. That's our world! That beautiful, stunning landscape is where we live. I had the idea for this film for a long time. I wanted to talk about big issues. I want to talk about climate, our aging population, social services and what do we owe each other? The landscape in the film is definitely its own character, and I wanted to show everybody exactly how precious this world is and how precious our time here is. The beauty was really important, but the beauty was just there. I had a great production designer, and I had an amazing cinematographer, and we've worked together before, but we built on what was there.
I really felt a resonance between the witnesses and Mormon missionaries. What role does faith play in this world?
Definitely, it's a religious reference, like Marvin Gaye's song, ‘Can I Get a Witness?’, and they are dressed like little Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormons that come to tell you about the afterlife. This world is not a religious world, but an ethical world. But also, a lot of cultural things have to be repressed for people to be able to walk through this - in so many religions, taking one's own life for any reason is completely antithetical to basic tenets. However, there's this idea of martyrdom, of laying down your life for others. These ideas came to me later, after I was writing.
My next question is about the doodles on screen that brought the film to life, which was a really interesting evolution from Window Horses and Stick Girl. What was your inspiration for putting them in Can I Get A Witness specifically?
Or as I call them, the schmoodles, death schmoodles! It was interesting because animation was going to play a much larger role in the film, Kiah’s an artist, she's illustrating these end-of-life ceremonies. But I think a sub-theme of the film is kindness — a kindness to each other that we don't show each other. The animation was supposed to show her drawings coming alive and showing the feelings that are really going on. But it became such an emotional experience shooting the film and with the actors. I felt, wow, we can just do a pretty light touch here, to show the animation is telling another story, and also to remind us that this is not a real world. This is a world of the imagination. The schmoodles appear when there's an association with an upcoming death. They're doodles that she does, but they're also unformed thoughts that haven't become something yet. They're just an idea of something.
How do you balance between dark and light in this film: or more specifically, despair and hope?
I think that all my films deal with really heavy subjects, and I like to do it with a bit of humor. I know there's not a lot of humor in this film, but there is lightness, right? I think that is the nature of existence, balancing this dark and light. What I want to show is that we can live with intention, and that we have agency. A lot of people concentrate a lot about the meditation on death and humanity: but this is about climate action. Let's talk about just where we are — we're all in it and there's 8 billion of us on the planet. I was writing this film a long, long time ago, in the early 2000s. I think it didn't make sense to a lot of people until COVID, you know, when we are asking each other those ethical questions about what we'd be willing to do. And is it worth it? For example, Medical Assistance In Dying is legal in Canada now. It was illegal when I was writing the film. So it was very much a futuristic thought experiment, then after COVID and after MAID, it's like the world kind of caught up to my make-believe world.
A scene that really balances seriousness with some comedy is the group talk scene, I remember I read quite a few reviews that said I never thought I'd see Zoolander mentioned so much at TIFF. I'd love to hear about that because that scene was striking; it has resonances of an AA meeting or group therapy, but all babyfaced teenagers.
I thought it was hilarious. I think a lot of the film is really funny, but I'm glad you enjoyed that. It was interesting, too, as Joel and Kira were always by themselves or with older people. We shot that in one day where they were actually in a room full of their peers, and very much this is a generational film in terms of how old you are, and where you are in the cycle of life will really affect how you feel about this. You think 50 is too young to lose your parent, but in fact, in real life, that happens all the time, I've been losing people my whole life, from kids to older. It's like you think there's a natural progression to things, but we're all experiencing things out of time and out of order. Sandra Oh thought that I needed to have something about AI in there, so I wrote that two days before we shot it. I was wondering, Oh my God, like we're just talking about AI now and everything's going to change instantly. How do I write something that is not going to sound completely stupid in five minutes, you know? There’s also a light in the middle that’s supposed to look like campfire and that's supposed to look like what we do forever — we sit around and we tell each other stories.
Do you see yourself in any of the characters, like Ellie or Kiah? Do you think there are elements of you in them, or do you think they're characters on a stage for you?
When I was writing this, I was trying to be as fictional as possible. Of course, there's a little bit of you in everything you write. I landed up writing this very tender, love story between Ellie and Kiah, mother and daughter, and that had to come from somewhere (like from outer space!). I love what Daniel says — he's so matter of fact, but he's the person that lives with death, and he has since he was a kid. The things he says are so wise, and he says them so cavalierly, so off the cuff. I think, I think philosophically, he's my spokesperson. He had run out of heart surgeries, but it’s real life, even in countries with universal healthcare, you can only take up so many resources. It’s not really a kind of a different reality, it's kind of just what we're living in. There's a veneer to the society that we live in that makes it acceptable to us, and there's a lot of hard choices that people are making all the time, especially when the medical system is under duress, especially like it is in the UK.
I noticed that foxgloves appear in the opening sequence, in the background of Kia's first end-of-life ceremony and you've scattered them throughout. As foxgloves are poisonous to humans and animals, was there a significance to the detail of the foxgloves?
Yes, thank you for noticing! Digitalis is a heart drug and it can be used for medical purposes, but also it's highly toxic. There's nothing about the foxglove that isn't toxic. So the animated spooosh that you see, that's digitalis (I couldn't really afford as much CGI as I'd like to). The foxglove is deadly, but also it provides life. It's part of the cycle of life. So that's very much why the foxgloves are there. However, that part of the coast is filthy with foxgloves. So Mother Nature definitely wanted to have some creative control in this film.
Speaking of the first ceremony, it's so incredibly tender as they stir the matcha together, then you discover that the wife wasn't supposed to pass this year and decided to go with him. I would love to hear you talk a little bit about that. I think there were many ways you could depict it, but I just felt so touched by — I feel like we don't see it a lot on film — the gentleness of death.
The gentleness, the tenderness. The love between those two. Yes, exactly. It was a very teary day: Peter couldn't stop crying, so I told the actor who played Anna, Your job is to make him not cry. He was a mess because he felt so lucky to be there. And everything in the film is to show how beautiful this world is and how lucky we are to be here. When I wrote what they say to each other, I thought, what do you say when you're going to say goodbye? What do you want to leave? There’s a lot of death in the film, but there's no violence. That was very, very important to me. That was something I was going to say about the group too, is that originally I was going to have all of their notebooks be animated and show what they were doing. I did some tests and I was just shocked. I didn't want to show violence at all. It was funny too when Daniel is so cavalier and says, “Oh, she didn't have to go. She had another year. I would have taken the year.” I thought, oh, it'd be funny if he said this because it's so harsh, right? But it's also true. I did that as a little interjection to break the mood. I didn't realize until my editor told me about how much about this film was about mental health. In that scene, you've got Kiah going from seeing her first death to being literally sick from this experience. And then just in a couple of minutes, Daniel's got her laughing, he’s extremely skilled. He's brought her from very, very upset to able to continue to do her job. And, of course, you have the foxgloves behind her as well, which is lovely. We started shooting, and then the wind started blowing: I went, oh, look at that. It was just magical.
Edited by Lara Walsh, Co-Film & TV Editor
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