END OF LIFE is the product of four years spent by John Bruce and Paweł Wojtasik with five individuals at various stages in the process of dying. In preparation for this project, the filmmakers trained to be end-of-life doulas and documented hundreds of hours of interactions with their subjects. The Doula works with the dying person, along with those surrounding him or her, to help design, guide and support their wishes for whatever a “good death” might mean for them. The film employs an immersive, participatory approach intended as an invitation for viewers to explore their body, their senses, and their ability to be present in relation to their own mortality. Bruce and Wojtasik became increasingly interested in visceral, primal responses to mortality, and during their shooting process these responses became their own. There is an openness, even a certain willed ambivalence, to this approach that reflects the unique quality of life in its final phase, when the mundane and the significant seem to flow seamlessly, one into the other. The two Greek words differentiating time - chronos (clock time) and kairos (the supreme moment), reflect the durational form of the film - the disruption of sequential logics at the end of life and the emergence of temporal poetics.

Direction: Paweł Wojtasik, John Bruce

Production: Athina Tsangari

Co-Production: John Bruce

Cinematography: Paweł Wojtasik, John Bruce

Editing: Ian Hassett

Sound: Leandros ​ Ntounis

Cast: Ram Dass, Matt Freedman, Carol Virostek, Doris Johnson, Sarah Grossman

Original Title: END OF LIFE

Original Language: English

Film Production Countries: Greece, United States of America

Website: https://www.endoflifeproject.com/

Statement of the Director/s
End of Life is the product of four years spent by John Bruce and Paweł Wojtasik with five individuals at various stages in the process of dying. In preparation for this project, the filmmakers trained to be end-of-life doulas and documented hundreds of hours of interactions with their subjects. In lieu of imposing any semblance of narrative upon their subjects, Wojtasik and Bruce strove simply to record “what they did or did not do, what they said or did not say.” There is an openness, even a certain willed ambivalence, to this approach that reflects the unique quality of life in its final phase, when the mundane and the significant seem to flow seamlessly, one into the other. The results defy cultural and cinematic conventions in equal measure, producing an uninflected vision of a process that remains pathologically hidden within the operations of everyday life.

Biography of the Director/s
JOHN BRUCE
John Bruce is a filmmaker, designer, and educator. He has directed and produced many short films and theatre installations, as well as music videos for MTV and VH1. His first film APPLE JUICE (1990), a short documentary about downtown Manhattan skateboarding culture, aired on PBS and Showtime, and was revived at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2013. He served as production manager and art director for a number of feature films, and platform producer for several transmedia projects addressing social issues. He is Assistant Professor of Strategic Design at Parsons / The New School, where he leads a studio course, Design for Living and Dying, in the Transdisciplinary Design MFA program.
John serves as the President of the Board of Trustees for the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar. He earned a BFA from the School of Visual Arts, and an MBA in Sustainable Systems from Pinchot. He was a 2015/16 Fellow at the Graduate Institute for Design Ethnography and Social Thought at The New School.

PAWEL WOJTASIK
Paweł Wojtasik is a filmmaker and video artist born in Łódź, Poland and currently living in Brooklyn, NY. Wojtasik received an MFA from Yale University in 1996. From 1998 until 2000 he was a resident at Dai Bosatsu Zendo Buddhist monastery in New York State. His 2009 video installation Below Sea Level debuted at MASS MOCA before traveling to the Prospect New Orleans Biennial in 2011. Pawel’s film PIGS (2010) won the grand prize at the 2011 Hong Kong International Film Festival, and was shown in the Berlin and New York Film Festivals. In 2012, he was awarded a Fulbright fellowship and was named a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) fellow in Video/Film. His work Single Stream (a collaboration with Toby Lee and Ernst Karel) was exhibited at the Museum of the Moving
Image in New York; the 2014 Whitney Biennial; and the Ann Arbor and Locarno Film Festivals. Wojtasik’s work has been exhibited at MOMA / PS1, New York; the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; Martos Gallery, New York; and Michael Thibault Gallery, Los Angeles.

Filmography of the Director/s
John Bruce:
2018 - ACME Death Kit
2007 - Danger Island
2001 - Headstand
1990 - Apple Juice

Paweł Wojtasik:
2018 - ACME Death Kit, short
2014 - Single Stream, short
2011 - Nine Gates, short
2010 - Pigs, short
2009 - Below Sea Level, short
2006 - The Aquarium, short
2005 - Naked, short
2004 - Dark Sun Squeeze, short

World Sales:
Grasshopper Film (North America sales)
Ryan Krivoshey
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New York, NY, 10016, United States of America
E-Mail: [email protected]
Phone: +1 (646) 586-3060 x.102
Website: http://grasshopperfilm.com/