SPREAD THE WORD ABOUT THIS IMPORTANT AND INFORMATIVE FILM EVENT AND DISCUSSION:
End of Life, a documentary film that was nominated for the 2018 European Film Awards, will be shown Sunday, March 3, at 2 p.m. in Room NAB 4414B of Upstate Medical University’s Weiskotten Hall, 766 Irving Avenue, Syracuse. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion and reception with the filmmakers, Paweł Wojtasik and John Bruce. The panel will include members of the Syracuse-area hospice, medical and spiritual communities. The event is free and open to the public.
Wojtasik and Bruce trained to be end-of-life doulas and documented many hours of their interactions with the five people featured in the film, who were each at various stages in the process of dying.
The 2018 New York Film Festival writes, “John Bruce and Paweł Wojtasik’s radiant film takes a respectful and serenely composed look at the very activity, the actual work, of dying for five individuals: Sarah Grossman, the spiritual teacher Ram Dass, Carol Virostek, Doris Johnson, and the artist, writer, and performer Matt Freedman. This is not a film of rhetoric but of concentrated and sustained attention to an area of experience at which we all arrive but from which the living flinch. Bruce and Wojtasik are tuned to a very special and extraordinarily delicate wavelength as artists, and they create a rare form from the silences, the incantatory repetitions, the mysterious repeated gestures, and the communions with the mystery of being enacted by the dying.”
Free parking will be available in the Irving Ave Garage and the Hillside lot. Visit http://parking.syr.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Pad-Map-North-Master-September-2018.pdf for a parking map that also identifies the location of Weiskotten Hall. The film is closed captioned. American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation will be provided for the panel discussion and the reception.
Co-sponsors for this event include the Zen Center of Syracuse, Upstate Medical University's Spiritual Care Center, the Consortium for Culture and Medicine, SU’s Aging Studies Institute, Hendricks Chapel, the Contemplative Collaborative, and the Burton Blatt Institute’s Interdisciplinary Programs and Outreach Initiative. Media sponsor is WRVO Public Media.
About the film
Leo Goldsmith of Artforum writes, “the filmmakers become not merely observers but caregivers—embedded, and in one scene literally in bed, with their subjects. In this way, the End of Life subtly breaches the boundaries between documentary modes, the real and the fantastic, with a style that alternates (and sometimes collapses) the immediacy of the Sensory Ethnography Lab’s films with a cosmic, even comic surrealism.”
More about the film at www.endoflifeproject.com
From their website, here are the bios for the filmmakers, who will be in Syracuse for the event.
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 Bruce is a filmmaker, designer, and educator. He has directed and produced many short films and theater 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 School of Design, where he leads the studio 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.
End of Life, a documentary film that was nominated for the 2018 European Film Awards, will be shown Sunday, March 3, at 2 p.m. in Room NAB 4414B of Upstate Medical University’s Weiskotten Hall, 766 Irving Avenue, Syracuse. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion and reception with the filmmakers, Paweł Wojtasik and John Bruce. The panel will include members of the Syracuse-area hospice, medical and spiritual communities. The event is free and open to the public.
Wojtasik and Bruce trained to be end-of-life doulas and documented many hours of their interactions with the five people featured in the film, who were each at various stages in the process of dying.
The 2018 New York Film Festival writes, “John Bruce and Paweł Wojtasik’s radiant film takes a respectful and serenely composed look at the very activity, the actual work, of dying for five individuals: Sarah Grossman, the spiritual teacher Ram Dass, Carol Virostek, Doris Johnson, and the artist, writer, and performer Matt Freedman. This is not a film of rhetoric but of concentrated and sustained attention to an area of experience at which we all arrive but from which the living flinch. Bruce and Wojtasik are tuned to a very special and extraordinarily delicate wavelength as artists, and they create a rare form from the silences, the incantatory repetitions, the mysterious repeated gestures, and the communions with the mystery of being enacted by the dying.”
Free parking will be available in the Irving Ave Garage and the Hillside lot. Visit http://parking.syr.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Pad-Map-North-Master-September-2018.pdf for a parking map that also identifies the location of Weiskotten Hall. The film is closed captioned. American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation will be provided for the panel discussion and the reception.
Co-sponsors for this event include the Zen Center of Syracuse, Upstate Medical University's Spiritual Care Center, the Consortium for Culture and Medicine, SU’s Aging Studies Institute, Hendricks Chapel, the Contemplative Collaborative, and the Burton Blatt Institute’s Interdisciplinary Programs and Outreach Initiative. Media sponsor is WRVO Public Media.
About the film
Leo Goldsmith of Artforum writes, “the filmmakers become not merely observers but caregivers—embedded, and in one scene literally in bed, with their subjects. In this way, the End of Life subtly breaches the boundaries between documentary modes, the real and the fantastic, with a style that alternates (and sometimes collapses) the immediacy of the Sensory Ethnography Lab’s films with a cosmic, even comic surrealism.”
More about the film at www.endoflifeproject.com
From their website, here are the bios for the filmmakers, who will be in Syracuse for the event.
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 Bruce is a filmmaker, designer, and educator. He has directed and produced many short films and theater 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 School of Design, where he leads the studio 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.
In June, 2018, three FCA of CNY Board members attended the FCA National Annual conference in Rochester, NY. Click here to watch this video that Nancy Aureli created to see what they learned at the Conference.
--About Us is where you'll find our mission statement and goals.
-Odds in the End is where you'll find links to articles and web sites that deal with end-of-life issues, sometimes with a humorous tone.
--Read Newsletters provides the current and back issues of our twice-a-year newsletter.
-Price Survey lists the cost of services for more than thirty central New York Funeral Homes. Shop here before you chose a funeral home for your loved ones.
-Contact is where you can easily send an email to us and we will respond as quickly as possible.
-Connect to the National is a one-click link to the national web site of the FCA where you can access their vast treasure of resources and find the address and web site of other local FCA's.
OFFICERS AND BOARD MEMBERS:
PRESIDENT: Jenifer Breyer
VICE PRESIDENT: Mark Monmonier
TREASURER: Susan Rainey
MEMBERSHIP & NEWSLETTER: Peter Moller
Nancy Aureli
Diane Case
Fred Davies (ex officio)
Lanny Freshman
Michael Goins
Josh Goldberg
Joyce Homan
Cheryl McLeod
Joel Potash
Robert Sarason
PRESIDENT: Jenifer Breyer
VICE PRESIDENT: Mark Monmonier
TREASURER: Susan Rainey
MEMBERSHIP & NEWSLETTER: Peter Moller
Nancy Aureli
Diane Case
Fred Davies (ex officio)
Lanny Freshman
Michael Goins
Josh Goldberg
Joyce Homan
Cheryl McLeod
Joel Potash
Robert Sarason