Directing

Paweł Wojtasik

Born 1952-01-01 · Łódź, Poland

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.

Acting credits

Behind the camera

Every Pulse of the Heart Is Work poster
5.0

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

Every Pulse of the Heart Is Work

2019

Single Stream poster
5.5

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.

Single Stream

2014

The Aquarium poster
NR

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.

The Aquarium

2006

End of Life poster
NR

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.

End of Life

2017

Pigs poster
NR

A close-range look at pigs living on a farm in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Pigs

2010

No artwork available
NR

A meditative exploration of a sewage treatment plant.

Dark Sun Squeeze

2003

No artwork available
NR

Naked shows a colony of naked mole rats living in a laboratory at a major American University.

Naked

No artwork available
NR

Nascentes Morimur consists of silent footage of an actual autopsy.

Nascentes Morimur