BIOGRAPHY
TAVU'I DR. MARINA ALOFAGIA McCARTNEY (Sāmoa - Sāmoeleoi, Sālilomaiava; England - Geordie, Romanichal) is an award-winning filmmaker and scholar.
She is the filmmaker behind Milk & Honey (2012), which depicts the Samoan experience of the Dawn Raids, and wrote and directed the Samoan piece for Vai (2019), which opened the NATIVe section at the 2019 Berlinale and screened at SXSW, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Sydney International Film Festival, and Melbourne International Film Festival. Her films have also screened at Palm Springs, NZIFF, and imagineNATIVE.
Marina is one of the most credited Pacific women screenwriters in prime-time New Zealand television, with credits including My Life is Murder (Seasons 4; 5), Blue Murder Motel (Season 1; 2 in production), and The Brokenwood Mysteries (Season 13, in production). Her short film The Return (2026, Māoriland Film Festival; Seattle International Film Festival; LA Asian Pacific Film Festival; NZIFF) is currently on the festival circuit, and she has several features and long-form projects in development, including her next feature, Dusky.
Marina is an experienced script and cultural screen assessor, with hundreds of assessments across short and feature films and long-form projects for major funding bodies and industry organisations, bringing Pacific-centred screen expertise rare locally and internationally. She created the first incubator for Pacific women writers to develop their feature films through Women in Film & Television, and was selected for the DEAGNZ Women Directors’ Incubator Programme (2019) and Script to Screen’s Film Up (2022).
Marina was awarded her PhD specialising in Pacific film theory in September 2026, making her the first Pacific writer-director in the world to hold one specialising in this area. Her research articulates a distinctly Pacific cinematic language, grounding film theory in a Pacific worldview and theorising these concepts from within creative practice. Her scholarship and films sit at the vanguard of global Indigenous cinema, offering a framework that redefines how Pacific stories are crafted, held, and witnessed on screen. She has a scholarly piece on Pacific film in the Routledge Handbook of Indigenous Film, along with several publications in development.
Marina holds the ali’i (high chief) title of “Tavu’i” from her village of Pitonu’ū in Satupa’itea, Savai’i, Sāmoa. In a former life, she was Miss New Zealand, one of the first Pacific women to hold this title.