Creator

Julie Mallozzi

Julie Mallozzi is a Boston-based documentary filmmaker and teacher who directed Monkey Dance.

Julie Mallozzi is a Boston-based documentary filmmaker and teacher who directed Monkey Dance (2004), about Cambodian American teenagers in Lowell, Massachusetts.[1][2] She is also a producer and editor, and she has taught filmmaking at Harvard University, the Rhode Island School of Design, Boston University and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.[3][1]

Career

Mallozzi earned a BA from Harvard University in 1992, where she studied English and Visual and Environmental Studies and worked with the filmmaker Robb Moss. She later earned an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute.[4][5][1] She began teaching at Harvard as a teaching fellow in 1997, taught in its Visual and Environmental Studies department for 13 years, and became Administrative Director of the university's Film Study Center.[4][5][1]

Her documentaries explore how traditional cultural practices can transform contemporary life, and much of her work deals with historical memory and cultural identity.[1][5] Her films have won festival awards around the world and have screened in museums, at universities and on public television. She often runs impact campaigns that use the films for social change in community and policy settings.[1] Through Julie Mallozzi Productions she also makes media for nonprofit organizations, and she organizes the Filmmakers Workshop salon for Boston-area media makers.[6][3]

Monkey Dance

Monkey Dance follows three members of Lowell's Angkor Dance Troupe, Samnang Hor, Linda Sou and Sochenda Uch, as they come of age as children of Cambodian refugees. Mallozzi directed, filmed and edited it.[2] The film shows how traditional Cambodian dance, blended with hip-hop, helps the three teenagers deal with gangs, drugs and teen pregnancy, and how the dance ties them to their parents' culture.[1][2] The troupe works to keep alive Cambodian dance traditions that were nearly lost under the Khmer Rouge, when most of the country's dancers and dance teachers were killed.[7]

Accounts of the shoot differ in length. In her filmmaker statement for New Day Films, Mallozzi puts the filming at four years, while the Harvard Gazette and The Harvard Crimson give three years.[8][7][4] She shot hundreds of hours on digital video, which cost less than film stock, and gave the three subjects small cameras to record their own lives. The finished film has no narrator, and the teenagers mostly tell their own story.[7][8][4] She set their stories against historical footage of the Khmer Rouge years and interviews with their parents.[7]

The film was made in association with the Independent Television Service, the Center for Asian American Media and WGBH-TV, with funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The Sundance Institute Documentary Fund, the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities and the LEF Moving Image Fund also supported it.[2] It premiered at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, on September 9, 2004, and screened at the Coolidge Corner Theatre as part of the New England Film Festival on October 8, 2004.[7] In the 2004 to 2005 school year she presented it to Asian American Studies classes at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.[9] It was broadcast nationally on public television and screened at festivals in seven countries.[1] Lowell High School asked her for a study guide so the film could be used in its curriculum, and the school encouraged teachers to watch it to understand their students' lives.[4]

In 2017 she made Dance Family, a 12-minute follow-up in which Linda, Sochenda and Samnang have returned to Lowell's Cambodian American community and are helping newer immigrants and refugees.[2]

Other films

Her first film, Once Removed (1999), follows her first trip to China and explores her Chinese and Italian heritage and the family's political past during the Cultural Revolution.[7][4] It won first prize at the National Council on Family Relations Media Competition, and its festival honors are listed in the infobox.[4][3] Indelible Lalita, a film and two-channel installation, follows Lalita Bharvani, whose sense of identity was shaped by moves from Bombay to Paris to Montréal and by illness and the loss of skin pigment. Mallozzi filmed her for three years in Canada, India and France.[1][5] Circle Up (2017) follows a Boston mother who reaches out to her son's killer and offers restorative justice. Together they work with trauma survivors, criminal justice leaders and Native American peacemakers to steer at-risk youth away from violence.[6][1]

Works


  • Once Removed (1999)[4]
  • Monkey Dance (2004), director, camera and editor[2]
  • Indelible Lalita[1]
  • Circle Up (2017)[6]
  • Dance Family (2017)[2]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 New Day Films, Julie Mallozzi
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 Julie Mallozzi Productions, Monkey Dance
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Julie Mallozzi, Wikipedia
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 The Harvard Crimson, VES TF's Documentary Shows Integrity (March 10, 2005)
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 Harvard Magazine, Soul Beyond the Skin (April 2013)
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Julie Mallozzi Productions
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 Harvard Gazette, 'Monkey Dance' illuminates refugees' lives (October 7, 2004)
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 New Day Films, Monkey Dance
  9. ↑ University of Wisconsin–Madison Asian American Studies Program, Bridges newsletter (May 2005)
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This page was last edited on 26 September 2026, at 23:39.