Community Affiliate
Marie-Josée Desharnais is a Filipina-Saudi filmmaker, writer and interdisciplinary artist working across experimental documentary, oral history, sound, moving image and participatory work. Adopted from the Philippines and raised in Québec, she explores being in between: languages, geographies, versions of the self, and the stories kept by families and institutions. Rather than treating identity as something to retrieve intact, she asks how belonging takes shape through encounters, retellings and acts of listening.
Her work starts with what is already there: a voice, a hesitation, a family photograph, an administrative document, the ambient sound of a place. Through recording, self-interviewing, re-listening, repetition and recomposition, she explores what changes when memories are spoken, heard again or shared with others, and what remains unspoken. For her, oral history is not only a source for a film; it can become the film’s structure, an installation, a collective portrait or an evolving archive.
In Jaconda: Portraits of Filipinx Belonging, with Centre Kapwa (Kalayaan School workshop series), she invited participants to explore belonging through personal objects, photographic portraits and oral storytelling. She has participated in Radyo Kapwa on CKUT 90.3 FM as both an interviewed artist and a co-host. Her participatory installation THIS IS NOT ME / Assembly Line also extended into a film she directed.
Her ongoing work includes Néoconfessional / Réparation orale, a self-interview sound journal where earlier answers return to complicate later ones, and La casita — Cartografía de un « Kumusta ». Beginning with the Filipino greeting kumusta, rooted in the Spanish ¿cómo está?, the latter historical and linguistic connections between the Philippines and Mexico through conversations, ambient sound and analogue photographs made with participants. Across these forms, she asks who holds a story, who hears it, and what changes in the telling.
