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Directors: 
John Bruce and Paweł Wojtasik

Co-producers:
Athina Rachel Tsangari, Ian Hassett: HAOS Film; John Bruce and Paweł Wojtasik: Train-Tracks Inc. (USA and Greece)

Associate producers: Daniela Alatorre, Maria Hatzakou, Lori Hanau

Running time:
91 minutes

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

Distribution in North America (licensing for libraries):
Grasshopper Film

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End of Life is the product of six 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 co-created hundreds of hours of interactions within collaborative exchanges. The Doula works with the dying person, along with those surrounding them, 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.

End of Life project includes: the feature-length film End of Life (2017); the immersive film installation End of Life, curated by Equitable Vitrines in Los Angeles (2016); collaborations with Design for Living and Dying, a research and design studio at Parsons, The New School (2016-18); and the installation (IM)MORTALITY curated by Park Place Gallery, NY (2018). Collaborations with End of Life project and Matt Freedman include: short film and performance ACME Death Kit, Park Place Gallery, NY (2018); short film and performance Sleight of Hand, Studio 10 Gallery, NY (2019); and the film/performance Magic and Catastrophe, presented by Park Place Gallery and Studio 10 Gallery, NY (2020). The series Endless Broken Time by Matt Freedman and Tim Spelios features their drawing/talking/percussion performances at Studio 10 Gallery, NY.

 

 

 

 
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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 travelling 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. Wojtasik is represented by Video Data Bank.


John A. Bruce is a film/video artist, researcher, and educator. He has directed and produced several short films, immersive experiences, and installations, and collaborated on media, art, and technology projects addressing social issues. His work is informed through explorations of presence, proximity, temporality, participation, queerness, reciprocity, invitation, care and hospitality. He is Associate Professor of Design Strategies at Parsons School of Design, where he serves as Director of the MFA Transdisciplinary Design program and co-founded the studios Collective Fabulation, and Design for Living and Dying. His recent monograph,  Participatory Design and Social Transformation: Images and Narratives of Crisis and Change, Routledge 2022. Recent chapters: “Mortality,” in Designing in Dark Times: An Arendtian Lexicon (editors Eduardo Staszowski and Virginia Tassinari), 2020; and “Design Strategies for Impact,” in Routledge Handbook for Sustainable Design (editor Rachel Beth Egenhoefer), 2017. He was a 2015/16 Fellow at the Graduate Institute for Design Ethnography and Social Thought at The New School. He is a member of the Vaporia Collective.

Press

 

life before death: john bruce and pawel wojtasik interviewed

BOMB, by NICHOLAS ELLIOTT. May 17, 2019

GET Real

Artforum, by LEO GOLDSMITH. April 13, 2018

'END OF LIFE' Film review | cinéma du réel

Hollywood Reporter, by JORDAN MINTZER. April 6, 2018

A movie to put death near sight, near the heart

Publico, by JORGE MOURINHA. October 26, 2017

efa: 15 documentaries selected

European Film Academy, press release. August 15, 2018

thessaloniki TV interview with athina tsangari (video)

Radio Arvyla, by Antonis Kanakis. March 7, 2018

TALKS and DISCUSSIONS

SYracuse ny post-screening panel discussion (video)

Zen Center of Syracuse, Upstate Medical University’s Spiritual Care Center, the Consortium for Culture and Medicine, Syracuse University’s Aging Studies Institute, Hendricks Chapel, the Contemplative Collaborative and the Burton Blatt Institute’s Office of Interdisciplinary Programs and Outreach. March 3, 2019

April 5, 2020 online post-screening discussion (video)

Post-screening performance by Matt Freedman, followed by online discussion with Matt Freedman, John Bruce and Pawel Wojtasik, facilitated by Sam Haddix and Theo Wilkins.

LIFE IN PROXIMITY TO DEATH: A QUESTION OF DESIGN (video)

An evening with Karla Rothstein (Columbia GSAPP) and John Bruce (Parsons School of Design) as they discuss their respective projects on how we may support the dead and the dying. Moderated by Maggie Jones of The New York Times. Organized by the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life and cosponsored by Columbia GSAPP. It is part of the Reimagine End of Life Festival. October 27, 2020.

 

INSTALLATION VERSIONS:

Two Filmmakers Captured the Process of Dying and Turned It into an Immersive Experience

Artsy, by MAXWELL WILLLIAMS. September 13, 2016

(IM)MORTALITY: 
John Bruce and Pawel Wojtasik, with a performance by Matt Freedman

Brooklyn Rail, by TANEY RONIGER. June 5, 2018

 

Schedule

 

INSTALLATION AND PERFORMANCE

 

Curated by Equitable Vitrines, September and October 2016. For this immersive version of the End of Life project, the exhibition was installed in a suite on the 27th floor of the Equitable Life building – a modernist office high- rise in the Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles. Reservations were required, a maximum 12 guests once per day at sunset.

 

Curated by Park Place Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, the installation (IM)MORTALITY presents the short film ACME Death Kit accompanied by a performance by Matthew Freedman. May 2018.