“End of Life” – Screening and Panel Discussion

Special Screening of Documentary End of Life

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, spiritual and social justice 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.”