Molly is a film short (15 minutes), an attempt to overcome common or mainstream standards of cinema by way of engaging in James Joyce’s famous “Molly Bloom’s Soliloquy” from his legendary novel Ulysses.

Molly features Ukrainian-born, Russian actress Oksana Mysina in the title role, a symbol of women’s emancipation, of the empowerment of women’s sensitivities, and of women’s phantasmagorical manner of thinking.

This brilliant and masterfully rambling monologue was written in stream-of-consciousness, and that is precisely the genre of this cinematic exploration that interweaves poetic fantasies, erotic memories, and improvisations that tumble about in a marvelous, riotous flow.

The idea of putting Mysina together with this text belonged to Nikolai Berman, a young Moscow director, who directed an online reading of the text in a project called Readings in Ulysses, produced during the COVID pandemic with the aid of the Voznesensky Center in Moscow.

Oksana Mysina created her own independent film as a continuation, a next-step development of the original large-scale theatrical project that was streamed over Zoom, and involved Russian actors based in various countries.

What is a woman?

What is her secret?

What is the true face she wears over her essence?

The two-in-one director and actor walk their paths together, hand-in-hand, balancing on a tightrope over an abyss.

They do so with a healthy dose of self-irony.

And they do so without gratuitous embellishment.

Directed by Oksana Mysina. Cinematography by John Freedman. Music composed by Sergei Kuchmenko. Russian translation by Sergei Khoruzhy. Joyce's original text in the subtitles. Produced by Free Flight Films, 2025.