Title: Weaving Identity
Director: Marie-Josée Desharnais
Genre: Poetic documentary / visual essay
Length: 75–90 min
Countries: Canada • Philippines • USA
Languages & Subtitles: English • French • Tagalog
Format: HD / 4K
Status: Development
Title: Weaving Identity
Director: Marie-Josée Desharnais
Genre: Poetic documentary / visual essay
Length: 75–90 min
Countries: Canada • Philippines • USA
Languages & Subtitles: English • French • Tagalog
Format: HD / 4K
Status: Development
Logline
A woman born in Manila and adopted in Quebec reconstructs her fragmented identity through personal archives, textile gestures, and community rituals— weaving together silence, trauma, and diasporic memory.
Synopsis
Weaving Identity is a sensory documentary about adoption, diaspora, and the fragile reconstruction of self. The director returns to the Philippines not to seek a single “origin,” but to move through uncertainty, reconnect with fragments, and ground herself through community, textiles, and embodied rituals.
MJ's note from the director
This film emerges from rupture and tenderness. As a transnational adoptee, my archives contradict themselves, and silence shaped most of my early life. I do not look for closure; I look for presence. Weaving Identity is built through relational ethics, shared vulnerability, and the belief that identity is not found—it is woven.
Artistic Vision
A poetic, non-linear cinematic language built on:
• intimacy and texture (fabric, skin, paper)
• a sonic architecture of breath, friction & layered quietness
• textile gestures as metaphor and method
• collaboration over extraction — participants are co-creators
• four movements shaped like a musical score
The film inhabits ambiguity instead of resolving it.
Four Movements
Groundhog Day — suspended time, exhaustion, small ruptures
All at Once, Once for All — archives, contradictions, diasporic friction
In Kapwa — co-presence, rituals, community care
Ruined Remains — integration, ambiguity, tenderness
Filming Locations
Canada: Montréal, Vaudreuil-Dorion, Toronto
USA: New York City, Honolulu
Philippines: Metro Manila, Coron in Palawan
Team
Marie-Josée Desharnais
Director & Screenwriter
Jean-Michel Martin
Director of Photography
Tiago McNicoll Castro Lopes Sound Recordist
Maria-Lorraine Caluya
Audio Engineer
Production Company
MJMT Inc., Vaudreuil-Dorion, Quebec, Canada
Fiscal Sponsor: UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art (NYC) - conditionnally accepted