Julie Mallozzi’s documentary films explore the transformative healing power of traditional cultural practices in the contemporary world.
UNCONSCIOUS MEDICINE
A mother is devastated by the murder of her son. Instead of being vengeful she reaches out to her son’s killer and offers a chance at restorative justice. They team up with trauma survivors, criminal justice leaders, and Native American peacemakers to divert at-risk-youth from more violence – turning pain and anger into positive community change. (69 minutes & 14 minutes, 2017)
INDELILBLE LALITA
An Indian woman completely loses her skin pigment as she migrates from Bombay to Paris to Montréal. Now 60 and appearing White, Lalita copes with a changing identity as she battles ovarian cancer, breast cancer, and heart failure – ultimately realizing that her body is just a temporary vessel for her spirit. (71 minutes, 2012)
MONKEY DANCE
Three Cambodian-American teenagers come of age in a world shadowed by their parents' Khmer Rouge nightmares. Traditional Cambodian dance links them to their parents’ culture, but fast cars, hip consumerism, and new romance pull harder. The three teens gradually come to appreciate their parents’ sacrifices and make good on their parents’ dreams. Followed up in 2017 with DANCE FAMILY. (65 minutes, 2004)
A young filmmaker travels to China to meet her mother's family for the first time, and gets caught in a web of politics and history. Weaving together dreams, archival footage, and scenes from her relatives' lives, she meditates on the complications of remembering and forgetting the past. (52 minutes, 1999)
ORPHAN TRAIN
From 1850 to 1930, over 200,000 orphan children were sent from New York and Boston to find homes in the Midwest. Trains full of kids would stop at small towns where local farmers came to indenture or adopt them. Julie's 16mm student film explores this little-known history through the eyes of the last surviving orphan train riders. (15 minutes, 1992)
INSTALLATIONS
60.30.1
An 11-site light and video installation commissioned by Harvard University in honor of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Declaration's 30 articles were projected as “light graffiti” around the undergraduate, law, and government campuses, along with a site-specific video loop outside the main library. (10 light projections and 4-minute animation loop, 2008)
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BREAKFAST
An autobiographical video sculpture exploring the mutability of memory and the ephemerality of the small moments that make up life. The piece rolls through five seconds of each of the artist’s breakfasts with her family for an entire year. It is rear projected onto a floating mylar sheet. (30-minute video loop on mylar, 2011)
25TH & MISSION
A video piece installed in the laundromat where it was partially filmed. Projected on a hanging bedsheet for customers to encounter, the abstract imagery develops into a portrait of four tiny shops in a block of San Francisco’s Mission district. The shops diverse shops are linked by location and by their inhabitants’ loving attention to beautifying surfaces. (7-minute video projection, 2009)
LALITA
A two-channel video installation exploring the idea of the body as a document onto which one's experiences are imprinted over the course of a life. A 60-year-old woman's body undergoes a remarkable transformation as her geography, environment, and emotional state change. (2-channel video projection, 16-minute loop, 2010)