There was a very definite inspiration for this short film. It came about in response to an advertisement I saw in late 2022 from a Canadian clothing company that made a commercial that presented the choice of a young Canadian woman to end her life under Canada’s Medical Aid in Dying program (https://vimeo.com/775487423). This is a real woman who chose assisted suicide about the same time that the ad came out. The cinematography and production design were fantastical and luminous, but the message was about killing yourself, and the product it claimed to be promoting was clothes. It seemed so absurd and dystopian to me. Euthanasia is a very serious and divisive issue, but presenting it so beautifully transcends all rational debate.

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Digging deeper, I learned that already 4% of all deaths in Canada are assisted suicide and 7% in the province of Quebec. In 2022, the rate increased by 30%, and this is before a planned expansion in the law that is going to open up assisted suicide to minors and to reasons of mental health. And the rate of the rate of increase is already increasing. Meaning it’s going to go exponential. Of course, all this comes at the expense of researching, developing, and promoting actual medical care. A fast track to eliminating illness and poverty is eliminating people with illness and poverty. The trend is rising very fast, and the laws are being copied in many countries. These numbers will easily be doubled in a few years.  I found this trend rather shocking. Commercials are bypassing rational debate, moving directly to normalization. Another advertisement in France just a month or so ago used Princess Diana’s death to promote euthanasia as well, saying Diana didn’t choose her death but in 2024, we should be able to choose.  So that just sparked thoughts on marketing techniques being applied to euthanasia, and I thought about how a similar campaign might work in the US.

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Americans are habituated to extremely sophisticated marketing techniques. So I imagined a 360 degree marketing campaign for euthanasia and how I could communicate its coercive nature in a scene that I could easily shoot with minimal locations and characters. That led me to a scenario of a saleswoman pitching a bartender at a dive bar to get at his customers in the way that a pharma rep wines and dines doctors to reach their customers. This saleswoman has an extremely well-prepared, well-rehearsed pitch and can effectively mobilize social networks and financial incentives for or against her target, depending on whether he complies. The scene might be a little exaggerated from reality, but the carrot and the stick are real. And the consequences of alignment or non-alignment with the cause are well known to people who understand the full-on marketing campaign. Campaign is a military term. This is a battle scene. More of an ambush actually, because the targets don’t see it coming. They didn’t even know there was a war for them.