Maloney’s latest feature, a rapacious romp through the Institution of marriage’s squalid history, filmed against spectacular backdrops of Costa Rican beaches and Moscow and Paris cityscapes, not to mention the fantasy realms of the protagonists’ minds, is an ambitious project. She intermixes an actual environmental crisis in Costa Rica with fanciful sequelae (male impotence), adds a Lysistrata inspired gathering of women trying to solve the problem, conflates issues of domestic violence, a sentimental developer of honeymoon resorts, and a demented mother – and voila! Out of the brew comes an unusual love story between an earnest environmentalist running a nature preserve and a cynical young researcher of current day marriage survivors. The “Institution” is a comedy, yet in Maloney’s signature style, it’s not entirely light, and it’s not entirely what it seems.

The Institution, completed in May 2010, is Maloney’s second major movie. Her first feature film, the “Sunsetters,” embroils an unlikely cast of misfits at a philosophy camp in a remote area of Costa Rica into an examination of the perfect way to live a single hour of life. As typical with the rest of her works, philosophical questions run wild in exotic settings.

Over the last decade and a half Maloney has written and directed a number of short and mid-sized films. Her latest short filmed in France, Free Meal, was completed in 2010. Offering a dinner unlike any other, Free Meal explores whether there is such a thing as a free meal, anyway…

Throughout her forays into movie making, since her first short film, “The Cures for Love,” (repackaging Ovid’s sage advice two thousand years old), Maloney has manifested a proclivity for provocative, unanswerable questions addressed through complex and idiosyncratic characters. Eclectic in her practices, Maloney utilizes professional actors, friends, staff, and real people (and anyone else who wants to join in) to collaborate in her art projects. Her process at times utilizes improvisation, real life complications, and often plays between illusion and reality.

Currently both a part time MFA student at San Francisco Art Institute and a fulltime trial lawyer, Maloney is in the early stages of writing her next feature project which she tentatively plans to film the fall of 2011.