Marie Losier

Marie Losier is a filmmaker and visual artist. She studied literature at the University Paris 10 (DEA in American literature and poetry) and fine arts at Hunter College in New York, where she lived and worked for over twenty years. She has made numerous avant-garde, intimate, poetic and playful portraits of artists, filmmakers and musicians. Her films have been screened at numerous festivals (Cannes, Venice, Berlin, IDFA, Tribeca/NYC, CPH:DOX, Bafici, Cinéma du Réel, etc.). They have also been shown in museums, including Tate Modern (London), MoMA (NYC), the Centre Pompidou (Paris) and Whitney Museum (NYC). In 2025, her latest feature film, Peaches Goes Bananas, was selected for the Venice Film Festival. Also in 2025, she made a medium-length film, Barking In The Dark, dedicated to THE RESIDENTS, a collective of artists and musicians from San Francisco. She is currently working on a portrait of choreographer and dancer Marlene Monteiro Freitas, who opened the 2025 Avignon Festival with her piece NOT. This is the film that she will direct as visiting teacher at Le Fresnoy - Studio national.

Portraiture as a form

"For a little over twenty years, the most rewarding encounters of my life have given rise to 'biopics' of maverick artists that come out of a twofold writing process: the relationship between the filmmaker and the filmed, the ambiguity between the person being filmed and the director, the dialogue between the reality of a character and the setting that I imagine. A gentle blend of reality, documentation and artifice. The final result is constructed through the experience of working together with the person I have met. Thus, my films, drawings and performances reflect their subject, both in their content and meaning, and in their form. This was the case with Alan Vega, Peaches, George Kuchar, Guy Maddin, Richard Foreman, Tony Conrad, Genesis P. Orridge and, most recently, gay wrestler Cassandro and German electronic musician Felix Kubin."

In each of these f ilms, a relationship of friendship and work develops over time with the person being filmed. Only by virtue of this long and complete immersion, which allows for intimacy and creativity to intersect, is the film possible. The people become stars, beloved beings, and the films become love letters. Marie Losier thus captures a whole "classically" documentary part of life, the daily lives of people at home, in their studios, without intervening in what is happening: concerts, performances or that day's madness. In this sense, each film is presented as a documentary creation whose proximity to experimentation is fully embraced both in the aesthetic character of the film and in its narration. Each tableau brings together all the elements of cinema: the frame, the set, the lighting, the costumes, the make-up, the movements -- all being used as plastic materials. They play on artifice and staging.

Far from biographical or factual conventions, these films constructed like tableaux vivants -- that being their essence and their purpose -give centre stage to marginality, eccentricity, freedom, drama, the creation of spaces for play, antics, but also tragedy and creation. On each occasion, the aim is to take full advantage of fleeting moments and instants in order to extract a life force rather than simply bear witness to them.

Marie Losier does not make political art in the militant sense, but she politicises the personal, transforming every gesture, every costume, every film into an act of reappropriation.

Through her use of 16mm film, untreated materials and fragmented narratives, the artist offers an alternative to the standardisation of contemporary culture. She demonstrates that art can still serve as a tool for emancipation, for revealing the plural identities that make up our era, reminding us that, even in its most playful form, it can be an act of resistance. A celebration of creative freedom, a tribute to the margins and those who inhabit them. With her rich visual language and intimate narratives, Marie Losier transforms the space of art into a subversive celebration shot through with joyful reflections, a world where every detail tells a story of resistance and tenderness, where kitsch becomes political and friendship a work of art.