Paweł Wojtasik

Birth : 1952-01-01, Łódź, Poland

History

Paweł Wojtasik was born in Łódź, Poland, and lived in Tunisia before coming to the United States as a refugee in 1972. He received an MFA from Yale University in 1996. From 1998 until 2000 he was a resident at Dai Bosatsu Zendo Buddhist monastery in the Catskill mountains of New York State. Wojtasik’s internationally recognized films and video installations are visionary and poetic reflections on our environment and culture. Wojtasik’s film The Aquarium (2006) deals with the destruction of the oceans; while the 360° panoramic video installation Below Sea Level (2009-2011), with soundscape by Stephen Vitiello, concerns the plight of post-Katrina New Orleans. Below Sea Level was commissioned by MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) and shown there in 2009-2010 and in the PROSPECT. 2 biennial in New Orleans. Wojtasik’s Pigs (2010) was included in the 2010 New York Film Festival, and in the 2011 Berlinale — Forum Expanded. The film had its Asian premiere at the Hong Kong International Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prize in the short film category. Next Atlantis (2010), with music by Sebastian Currier, premiered at Carnegie Hall in New York in January 2010. At the Still Point was a five-channel video installation shot in India and commissioned by Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, NY. It was shown there in 2010. Another installation work, Single Stream (with Toby Lee and Ernst Karel), was presented at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York in 2013. The single-channel version of Single Stream was shown at the 2014 Whitney Biennial and at the Locarno and Ann Arbor film festivals, among others. Wojtasik’s first feature film End of Life (portraying five individuals nearing the end of their lives, co-directed with John Bruce) premiered at DocLisboa in 2017, and had its U.S. premiere at the 2018 New York Film Festival. The film was selected as a candidate for the 2018 European Academy Awards. Paweł’s most recent feature film Every Pulse of the Heart Is Work, on the theme of labor, shot in Benares and Kerala, India, had its NYC premiere at The Museum of Modern Art as part of 2020 Doc Fortnight.

Movies

Every Pulse of the Heart Is Work
Every Pulse of the Heart Is Work
Director
From a snake charmer to a welder, from a weaver to an obstetrician, the inhabitants of the holy city of Varanasi are striving for survival, and transform and ennoble themselves in the process. A hypnotic study of people at work—a street beggar, a surgeon, a weaver, a priest, a masseur, a tabla drum maker, and a crane operator: people who in their intense concentration and ritualized movements evoke the idea of human labor as an act of spiritual devotion and social interdependence. Filmed largely in India’s ancient holy city of Varanasi
Empty Metal
Empty Metal
Guru
Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer’s first feature as co-directors, Empty Metal takes place in a world similar to ours—one of mass surveillance, pervasive policing, and increasing individual apathy. The lives of several people, each inhabiting extreme poles of American social and political consciousness, weave together as each attempts to achieve some kind of forward motion, sometimes in contradiction, and always under the eye of far more controlling powers.
End of Life
End of Life
Director
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. The filmmakers trained to be end-of-life doulas and documented hundreds of hours of interactions with their subjects.
The Given
The Given
Pawel
An actress living in New York performs an audition, then goes to meditation and winds up at a party of artists viewing a film. At home, she and her girlfriend explore buried memories and later nightmares trigger sleepwalking. Finally, the actress enacts a childlike performance inspired by a Frank Wedekind play.
Single Stream
Single Stream
Director
Single Stream explores a recycling facility in the Boston area, where hundreds of tons of refuse are sorted daily. Blurring the line between observation and abstraction, Single Stream plunges the viewer into the steady flow of the plant and the waste it treats, examining the material consequences of our society's culture of excess.
Pigs
Pigs
Director
A close-range look at pigs living on a farm in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The Aquarium
The Aquarium
Director
Filmed primarily in Alaska, The Aquarium contrasts the openness of the primeval Arctic landscape with the entrapment of captured sea mammals in aquariums. It speaks of the progressive destruction of these animals’ habitat, seeing beyond the alluring spectacle.
Dark Sun Squeeze
Dark Sun Squeeze
Director
A meditative exploration of a sewage treatment plant.
Nascentes Morimur
Nascentes Morimur
Director
Nascentes Morimur consists of silent footage of an actual autopsy.
Naked
Naked
Director
Naked shows a colony of naked mole rats living in a laboratory at a major American University.