VES TF's Documentary Shows Integrity

It’s Sunday, March 6 and I’ve just asked director Julie M. Mallozzi ’92 a question that, if answered poorly, could devastate her integrity as a documentary filmmaker. Little do I know that her response will, in fact, blow my mind.

Monkey Dance is the second major documentary by Mallozzi, a current TF for Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) 150ar, “Film Production: Intermediate Studio Course.” Following three teenage Cambodian-American dancers from Lowell, Massachusetts over the course of three years in their lives, the film documents a wealth of situations that are rife with tense emotion—car crashes, prison sentences, and college financial aid issues.

Mallozzi’s work is so gripping and unrelentingly committed to understanding the kids’ life-altering problems that, while watching, I couldn’t help but wonder how she had wrangled with that sacred cow of documentary filmmaking: objectivity. So, in the post-viewing Q&A session, I’ve just asked her how she managed to maintain objectivity during such painful periods in her subjects’ lives, and whether or not she intervened at all. Immediately after I’ve spoken, I realize that my question could present her with a dangerous challenge.

Without missing a beat, the modest, soft-spoken Mallozzi openly admits to making an attempt to influence at least one major part of the film. Near the film’s end, one of the teens, Samnang, is accepted to his top-choice school, Brown University. However, due to a mix-up with his financial aid forms, he is unable to afford tuition, and has to decline the acceptance. At the Q&A, Mallozzi has no qualms about telling the audience members that she tried to raise money for the boy’s tuition.

“Objectivity is important,” she laughs. “But it’s more important to be a human being!”

Every aspiring filmmaker, journalist, or artist at Harvard can learn a lot from this incident: Mallozzi doesn’t get her inspiration from greedy dreams for multibillion-dollar box-office success or from pretentious notions of artistic purity. Both Mallozzi and her work are grounded in a relentless commitment to difficult truths and simple human dignity.

That’s not to say that Mallozzi is a simple person. From the very beginning of her life, she’s had to grapple with the frustration of an unclear cultural identity. Mallozzi grew up in rural Ohio as the child of a Chinese-born mother and an Italian-American father. “There were no minorities [where I grew up],” she recounts. “So we were considered very exotic, even though I was half-Chinese, and my mom didn’t even speak Chinese to us.”

Her arrival at Harvard in 1988 was no relief—Harvard’s Half-Asian Peoples Alliance did not yet exist, and as she recalls, “there were all these real Chinese people, and I really didn’t feel Chinese at all.”

On top of her ethno-cultural uncertainty, Mallozzi also found herself perplexed by her prospects as an undergraduate artist at Harvard. She initially had no intention of being a VES concentrator at Harvard.

“I started studying English,” she recalls, but during sophomore year, she realized that “studying English at Harvard was more like preparation for graduate school to become a professor…it wasn’t about writing original stuff of your own.”

Then, in 1988, she attended a campus screening of Mira Nair ’79’s 1988 film Salaam, Bombay. As Mallozzi watched a Harvard graduate receive the honor of introducing her own film on campus, she recalls thinking “‘Wow, that’s really cool! You can make films at Harvard!’” Mallozzi ended up joint-concentrating in English and VES, and now, close to 17 years later, film dominates her life.

Mallozzi’s tumultuous struggle to resolve ethno-cultural identity was less easily resolved, but she used her personal quest for self-understanding as the fuel for her first major documentary, 1999’s critically-acclaimed Once Removed. The film followed Mallozzi as she made her first journey to Communist China in order to learn about her family’s experiences during the Cultural Revolution.

The film had a successful run through the film festival circuit, and garnered first prize at the National Council on Family Relations Media Competition. The Boston Phoenix described it as “ingratiatingly unpretentious,” and that turn of phrase could really be used to describe the essence of Mallozzi’s personality and approach to filmmaking.

A prime example of this lack of pretension is Monkey Dance itself. The film is not in wide release (check out Mallozzi’s website at www.juliemallozzi.com for future screenings), but anyone who has the opportunity should jump at the chance to see it.

The un-narrated movie reels the audience into its tale of young adults raised both in turn-of-the-millennium suburbia and in the shadow of their parents’ memories of genocide, primarily by letting its subjects tell their own story. A significant portion of the film is shot by the kids themselves with hand-held cameras. When Mallozzi is behind the camera, her three-year effort reflects a painstaking and nonjudgmental commitment to capture minute details and make sure we don’t turn the characters into immigrant saints or ethnic stereotypes.

In one exemplary moment, one of the teens blandly mentions her parents’ lives under the “Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot, and all that” in the same tone she uses to describe getting her car detailed. In such a scene, Mallozzi doesn’t need flashy cinematic technique. She forces the audience to ask itself gut-wrenching questions about cultural memory and assimilation, by presenting the girl’s words without pretension or prejudice. Over three grueling years of filming, Mallozzi was able to capture a wealth of genuinely thought-provoking moments like this one.

The film has been making the festival rounds, but perhaps its greatest achievement will be in the educational and social service sectors. According to Mallozzi, Lowell High School has asked her to create a study guide to accompany the film, so that the school can show it as a part of the regular curriculum. In addition, the school has begun to ask its teachers to watch the movie in order to get a better sense of their kids’ everyday lives.

“It could run for ten years [in a format like that],” Mallozzi notes with a quiet joy, both for the potential shelf-life of the film and for the good work it can do.

Even though the film is a true achievement, Mallozzi never descends into self-important descriptions of her influences or intentions, although she would have a right to do so.

Her former teacher and current colleague, Arnheim Lecturer on Filmmaking Robb Moss, glowingly describes her as one who can “bring together her abilities as an image-maker with her interest in the social world” in a way that is “nuanced, complex, and emotive.” Yet she is refreshingly down-to-earth, and, as one of her VES 150 students puts it, “practical, taking into consideration our situation as undergrads.”

But how did Mallozzi end up becoming a TF at her alma mater? Her answer is characteristically honest: she started in 1997 for the film-editing resources Harvard could offer her, but has remained at the College because her students have helped her to discover “something I didn’t know when I started…[that teaching would] become this second passion.” But, of course, she needs her creature comforts, just like anybody else: “And [teaching’s] handy—it gives you health insurance and it pays the rent!”

As I walked away from our interview, I could not help but feel that Mallozzi and her work are buried treasures in the world of Harvard. And once you unearth them, prepare to have your mind blown.