JMP - Documentaries

Julie Mallozzi’s documentary films explore the ways in which we "repurpose" culture and history to address contemporary social problems. She works independently with funding from public television, private foundations, and individual donors. She also collaborates with other filmmakers on a freelance basis. Julie's major works to date include:

Lalita Bharvani is a resilient woman whose body has been remarkably transformed by loss of skin pigment, cancer, and other conditions. Born in Bombay in 1948, Lalita lived in Paris in her twenties and settled in Montréal with her French-Canadian husband. The film explores idea of the body as an archive onto which one’s experiences are imprinted over the course of a life. (Video and Installation, in progress)

Three Cambodian-American teenagers come of age in a world shadowed by their parents' nightmares of the Khmer Rouge. Traditional Cambodian dance links them to their parents’ culture, but fast cars, hip consumerism, and new romance pull harder. Gradually coming to appreciate their parents’ sacrifices, the three teens find a sense of themselves and begin to make good on their parents’ dreams. (65 minutes, 2004)

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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)

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. This 16mm student film explores this little-known history through the eyes of the last surviving orphan train riders. (15 minutes, 1992)