Film Essay - 05 film at glance

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