Wednesday, March 12 / 7:00 pm / Ottawa Art Gallery

Red Carpet: 6:00 PM
Program: perfectly a strangeness, Can I Get a Witness?, Q&A with Ann Marie Fleming
Guest: Ann Marie Fleming, director and writer of Can I Get a Witness?
Reception: 9:30 PM

This program is presented in partnership with Andrex Holdings.

Feature presentation \

With her characteristically masterful blend of live action and animation, Ann Marie Fleming fashions an imaginative tale of love and mortality set in a near future where our world faces environmental catastrophe. Can I Get A Witness? revolves around a mother and daughter living in a society which has agreed that to preserve the planet, technological devices have been rejected, there is no electricity, and nobody is allowed to live past the age of 50. As Ellie (the luminous Sandra Oh) ponders her limited future as she approaches that fateful age, her teenage daughter Kiah (Keira Jang) starts a job as a ‘Documenter,’ a key role in this new social order. With her pragmatic co-worker Daniel, who attends to the contractual details of the end-of-life arrangements of people, Kiah draws their dying ceremonies for surviving family members, as printing and photography are banned. As committed an artist as she is, though, the job takes an emotional toll on Kiah and soon will affect her relationship with her mother. Her first feature since 2016’s animation Window Horses (also starring Sandra Oh), Fleming’s inventive, winning drama is a thoughtful, timely, and deeply compassionate take on where humanity may be headed.

- Tom McSorley

Short film \

perfectly a strangeness

2024 / 15 minutes / Quebec
Director: Alison McAlpine
Language: No dialogue

In the dazzling incandescence of an unknown desert, three donkeys discover an abandoned astronomical observatory and the universe. A sensorial, cinematic exploration of what a story can be.

This program is presented in partnership with Andrex Holdings.