Missy Molloy

Missy Molloy is Senior Lecturer in film at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. She is co-author and editor with Meryl Shriver-Rice and Mimi Nielsen of ReFocus: The Films of Susanne Bier (Edinburgh University Press 2018), the first book dedicated to the Emmy, Golden Globe, and Academy Award-winning Danish director. Molloy, Shriver-Rice and Nielsen interviewed Bier (who most recently directed HBO’s The Undoing) about her three decades of work in film and television, with excerpts available on EUP’s blog: https://euppublishingblog.com/2019/01/25/in-conversation-with-susanne-bier/

With specializations in women’s, queer, and alternative cinemas, Molloy has published widely on women filmmakers including Chantal Akerman, Kathryn Bigelow, and Lucrecia Martel (several publications are accessible here: https://victoria.academia.edu/MissyMolloy). Her chapter “Fetal Imagery and Alternative Maternities in Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake” will appear in Mothers of Invention: Film, Media, and Caregiving Labor (Wayne State University Press). In New Zealand, Molloy lectures on feminist, queer, posthuman, small nation and activist cinemas. Her research in posthuman cinema developed into a book, Screening the Posthuman (co-authored with Claire Henry and Pansy Duncan), which is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Of relevance to Indigenous feminist cinema, Molloy’s chapter on posthuman disaster films features Lisa Jackson’s Biidaaban: First Light, a virtual reality experience that presents an Indigenous futurist vision of post-apocalyptic Toronto: http://lisajackson.ca/Biidaaban-First-Light-VR.

In addition, the Indigenous feminist collaboration this article spotlights is evident in two high-profile feature films that premiered in February 2021:
Cousins, https://www.nzonscreen.com/title/cousins-2021, which is co-directed by two Waru directors, Ainsley Gardiner and Briar Grace-Smith, and is the third feature film directed by Māori women after Merata Mita’s Mauri (1988) and Waru; and Night Raiders, https://www.nzfilm.co.nz/films/night-raiders, a Canada/Aotearoa NZ Indigenous co-production directed by Danis Goulet, which debuted at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. Night Raiders stars Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Violet Nelson (The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open’s lead actors) and was produced by two Waru directors (Gardiner and Chelsea Winstanley). In 2020, Telefilm Canada hosted a virtual panel discussion on Night Raiders as a case study of transnational co-production centered on ‘Indigenous protocols’ with Gardiner and Goulet as participants: https://www.facebook.com/telefilmcanada/posts/3475416572469901.