End of life

End of Life is the product of four years spent by John Bruce and Pawel 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 lige 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.