EVERY PULSE OF THE HEART IS WORK
2012-2019 · 83 minutes · Digital Video (excerpt)
Directed, shot, and edited by Paweł Wojtasik
Produced by Narimane Mari and Centrale Electrique.
Associate Producer: Olivier Boischot
Sound mix by Ernst Karel.
Color grading by Pierre Sudre.
Made possible by the Fulbright Program (USIEF).
Distributed by Grasshopper Film
Filmed largely in Varanasi and Kerala, India, Every Pulse of the Heart Is Work observes people engaged in a wide range of labor—from weaving, boat work, teaching, street trades, and ritual practice to medicine and surgery. The film approaches workers in an intimately attentive relation to their tools, gestures, and environments, allowing each activity to unfold through sustained observation.
The excerpt presented here brings together scenes of weaving, traditional oil massage, street barbering, and street dentistry. It reflects the film’s attention to bodily skill, concentration, care, and the environments in which work takes place.
About the Film
Through the workers’ intense concentration and often ritualized movements, labor emerges as a form of knowledge, discipline, and devotion. Individual portraits gradually build into a larger vision of society as a network of interdependence, in which each person and occupation contributes to the life of the whole. The film is informed by the idea of Karma Yoga—the possibility that work, undertaken with full attention and without attachment to its outcome, can become a spiritual practice.
Rather than explaining or judging what it observes, the film remains close to process, bodily intelligence, sound, duration, and the state of absorption that work can produce. In this way, Every Pulse of the Heart Is Work affirms the dignity of labor while asking whether work can also become a path toward freedom.
Watch the Film
Every Pulse of the Heart Is Work is available to rent or purchase through Grasshopper Film.
Interview: Paweł Wojtasik in conversation with Jim Supanick
A wide-ranging discussion of the making of Every Pulse of the Heart Is Work, including its relationship to Karma Yoga, labor as devotion, the social organism of Varanasi, and the film’s observational camera language.
Writing on the Film
Lawrence Weschler, “Wondercab Mini: Every Pulse of the Heart Is Work”
Weschler reflects on the film’s prayerful gaze, the devotional absorption of its workers, and its grounding presence amid contemporary digital life.
Selected Screenings
World premiere — Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, 2018 (an earlier version, entitled The End and the Means)
New York premiere — MoMA Doc Fortnight, 2020