Art of the Pitch

What a thrill to do my first public pitch at today's Art of the Pitch session at Making Media Now - for my new documentary Circle Justice - and to be selected as the best pitch! It was a great experience to stand in front of about 100 people, including a panel of industry folks led my wonderful moderator Judith Vecchione, and have just five minutes total to describe my project and show a video clip.  The feedback was very helpful, not to mention the audience's warm support.

I'm very excited by this Circle Justice project. It's a feature documentary about a woman named Janet Connors, whose son Joel was murdered in a home invasion 12 years ago. Frustrated by the inhumanity of the criminal justice system, Janet meets the perpetrators and becomes a leader of restorative justice circles.

PBS World Broadcast May 13

We're very excited to announce the television premiere of Indelible Lalita on May 13, 2013 on PBS World.  Check local listings for broadcast times.

A nice article, "Soul Beyond the Skin," just came out in Harvard Magazine about the film.

Stockhausen and Beyond

Last night at the Goethe Institut in Boston, Anne LaBerge and her daughter Diamanda La Berge Dramm played a really interesting program of "Stockhausen and Beyond" for Goethe's series New Music from Germany.  The selection held together very nicely, duets bookended on each end by a solo (flute and then violin).  Three of the pieces were world premieres written especially for Anne and Diamanda - by Natacha Diels, David Dramm, and my husband Jorrit Dijkstra.

Jorrit's piece "Expats" played on two worlds of sounds and speeds - reflecting the experience he, Anne, and Diamanda share (in different ways) of moving between the United States and the Netherlands.

Diamanda closed with an energetic, exquisitely detailed rendition of Luciano Berio's Sequenza VII.

It was really nice to get out, just two days after the Boston Marathon bombing, to hear some great music in the Back Bay.

Audience Award at WAM! Film Festival

We had a wonderful time sharing Indelible Lalita with audiences at the Women, Action, & The Media Film Festival at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge last Saturday.  The film was paired with Karen Rossi Couughlin's Holy Saturday, a hilarious fictional short about a Puerto Rican mother-daughter relationship.  I met Karen when we were both fellows at the Flaherty Film Seminar two years ago , and it was great to hang out with her again.

Several people came up to me after the screening to tell me how they were moved by the film, particularly the mother-daughter relationship.  Three separate audience members had lost their mothers in the previous year, and felt the resonance with Lalita's experience.

And I'm happy to say that the film won the festivals' Audience Award!

Photographic Memory

I thoroughly enjoyed last night's French Cultural Center screening of Ross McElwee's new film Photographic Memory, produced by Marie-Emmanuelle Hartness. It's a beautiful, thoughtful piece about many things - the fallibility of memory, time's passing on lost loves, a father's judgement of his adolescent son. Ross returns to the village in Brittany where he worked as a wedding photographer's assistant at age 24 - a bit older than his son Adrian is now.

I especially enjoyed the intimate, poetic writing and Ross's charismatic voiceover performance. He has such a strong vision as a filmmaker, and there is a clear McElwee style that carries through all of his films - but each one has a unique perspective because of where he is in his life. Photographic Memory looks back at a specific experience of young adulthood in the 1970s, from the (theoretically) much wiser position of middle age.

It was a very nice event, and fun to see Ross, with whom I collaborated as editor on In Paraguay; Marie, who is consulting producer on my Indelible Lalita; and Sharon Hong (who took the photo above), with whom I co-prodcued and edited My Louisiana Love. Congratulations, Ross and Marie!

A Fabulous First Run!

We had a great premiere and four additional screenings of my new film Indelible Lalita at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston January 10-16. My film subject, and now good friend, Lalita Bharvani came down from Montréal and charmed the audience with stories from her life and the making of the film. 

We got some very nice reviews, too:

"Mallozzi has layered her subjects’ stories with an intimate, visually arresting style that, without heavy handedness, conveys the impermanence of life...Through the singularly magnetic presence of Bharvani, the film becomes a universal offering for how to live one’s life. "  Loren King, Boston Globe

"Told limpidly and poetically by director Julie Mallozzi, with metaphorical montages combining images of passports, engravings of plants, and eerily beautiful X-rays, sonograms, and MRIs, this gently inspiring documentary suggests that, at least in Lalita's case, identity can transcend all change."  - Peter Keough, The Phoenix

“A touching story about a woman’s struggle with identity, a reflection on ethnicity and femininity...powerful.”  - Anthony Brooks, Radio Boston, WBUR 

The Patriot Ledger also published a brief interview with me about the film.

For those who missed the premiere, Indelible Lalita will be showing again at the Brattle Theater on March 23 or 24 as part of the Women, Action, & the Media Film Festival.

New England Partnership for Health Equity

The Boston Public Health Commission is looking back on a very successful multi-year grant program through its Center for Health Equity and Social Justice. The Center provided 17 grants to communities across southern New England to address the social determinants of racial health inequity through policy, systems, and environmental change

As part of their evaluation, the Center asked us to produce this roundtable discussion video, in which grantees reflect on their experiences.  It was very inspiring to hear about how this learning community shared ideas, contacts, tools, and energy to create long-term change in their communities.