photo:Andrew Page

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Synopsis

Color, 65 minutes (theater version) / 56:40 (TV version)
English and Khmer with English subtitles

MONKEY DANCE is a documentary film about three teens coming of age in Lowell, Massachusetts. Children of Cambodian refugees, they inhabit a tough, working class 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 good times often pull harder. For the parents, Lowell held the hope of safety, employment, and a chance to finally rebuild some of what was shattered by the Khmer Rouge. But for their children, the city offers a dizzying array of choices – many of them risky. Monkey Dance is the story of how three kids navigate the confusing landscape of urban adolescence and ultimately start to make good on their parents’ dreams.

Linda Sou is a freewheeling 17-year-old who struggles to overcome the shame cast on her family when her older sister was imprisoned for murdering an abusive boyfriend.  Linda has been dancing since age three, when her father founded the Angkor Dance Troupe to preserve Cambodian culture in America.  As time progresses, her commitment to the troupe wavers.  Linda’s wild ways intensify until she and a friend are injured in a serious accident.  A trip to Cambodia with her family to meet her village relatives brings Linda a new awareness of her parents’ losses and sacrifices.

Samnang Hor, an athletic 16-year-old born in a refugee camp in Thailand, is driven to achieve to make up for his two older brothers, who dropped out of high school because of their involvement with gangs and drugs. Sam works hard, and his mentors encourage him to see education as a way out of the ghetto.  On the exciting day he receives his college acceptance letters, he also realizes that getting into school is only part of the challenge – finding money to pay for it may be even harder.

Sochenda Uch, a lanky, fashion-conscious 16-year-old, works a series of part-time jobs to pay for the necessities and accessories of teen life – while his mother worries that he doesn’t study hard enough. Too many distractions soon take their toll: Sochenda’s grades start to slide, leading him to be rejected from all the colleges he applies to.   Only after another year and a half of hard work to get into college does Sochenda begin to understand what success or failure means, both for himself and his family.

Dance – both traditional and modern – is ultimately what makes a difference for these kids.  They belong to the Angkor Dance Troupe, a rigorous performance group preserving Cambodian dance traditions almost lost when 90% of its practitioners were killed in the violence of the Khmer Rouge. Cambodian dance provides Linda, Sam, and Sochenda with a unique connection to their parents’ culture at a time when many immigrant kids reject traditional culture as irrelevant to their lives here in America.  By making the dance their own, each of these young people forge a link with the past while also finding their way in America, where creativity, self-expression, and individual achievement are critical keys to success.

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photo:Andrew Page

Filmmaker’s Viewpoint

I work to capture an authentic voice in my films.  I really wanted to portray what it feels like to be a teenager – not just a first-generation immigrant teenager, but any teenager.  That’s why I also gave the three teens each a small video camera, so they could record their own lives.  My intention was to make a film about growing up in America and how tough it can be to make the right choices – and how this dance troupe was lending a hand.

I started out filming a lot with the dance troupe – rehearsals, performance tours, team-building workshops.  Then, I started to focus on three older kids in the troupe – Linda, Sochenda and Sam – and got interested in the rest of their lives as well.  I filmed for nearly four years, and as time passed, my relationship with the kids changed.  I became a parent myself, and I gradually became more interested in interviewing the kids’ parents.  I got a translator and we sat down and started talking about the long hours they worked in the nearby electronics factories; about their struggles as parents of American teenagers; and finally, about their experiences under the Khmer Rouge. 

I was just blown away. These kids’ parents had survived genocide – suffered through torture and murder and starvation.  Then finally the U.S. accepted them and they came to this place where they had nothing.  America wasn’t where they wanted to be, but all the parents told me – every one of them – that they came because they hoped to give a better life to their children.  I realized that this was what was at stake for Linda, Sam, and Sochenda.  What made them different was what their parents had been through to give them this life.

When I finally began editing all this material, I found myself asking: What are Linda, Sam, and Sochenda going to do with these opportunities for which their parents had sacrificed so much?  Are they going to squander them the way their older siblings had, or are they going to be different?  In the end, that’s the heart of the story in “Monkey Dance”: not just their lives as teens, right now, but what will become of their future and their parents’ hopes for them?

This project got closer and closer to my heart as I got further along in the process.  I shot most of the film myself as a one-person crew – riding along in speedy cars, waiting around in supermarket parking lots after hours, eating delicious homemade Cambodian food with the families.  I think we related partly because of my own Asian background – though I’m such a mix myself that I’m not sure what they saw of that.

My father is Italian-American and my mother is Chinese-American.  I grew up in the middle of nowhere in rural Ohio, where my family ran a roadside tourist attraction – actually a Native American historical site.  I guess that made me curious about displacement, about people who find themselves for some historical or political reason in another place.  My life experiences have drawn me to stories of cultural fusion and mixing. In Linda, Sam, and Sochenda, I saw an amazing mix of traditional Cambodian culture, White mainstream culture, and Black hip-hop culture.  Their spirited synchronization of these elements is part of what enabled these three to overcome difficult childhoods to become strong, successful adults.  I hope that this story will inspire other young people as they make difficult choices in their lives.

More info on the MONKEY DANCE website

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Screenings and Awards

photo:Andrew Page

Reviews and Press

Quotes: 

“A fascinating narrative of fusion, assimilation, and renewal — the hard inevitabilities of multiculturalism."
–– Marcia B. Siegel, Boston Phoenix

 “Mallozzi’s film is a truly masterful work portraying the lives of youth and families who are trying to begin new lives in a strange land while making peace with the ghosts of their past.”
–– David Wilcox Ed.D. Harvard Medical School Clinical Director of Adolescent Consultation Services, Middlesex Juvenile Court Clinics

“Julie Mallozzi has made two vivid, touching documentaries about the immigrant experience….  [Monkey Dance]’s treatment of the refugee experience is enlightening.”
–– Ken Gewertz, Harvard University Gazette

“The Cambodian monkey dance celebrates a pan-Asian folk hero, part trickster, adventurer and warrior, whose mind is as agile as his body.  The subjects of this documentary are equally agile in negotiating between the lures of American youth culture and the expectations of their parents who survived the Khmer Rouge atrocities of the 1970s…. Filmmaker Julie Mallozzi creates a moving portrait of these teenagers as they navigate the landscape of urban adolescence.”
–– Mary Carbine, Bridges: Asian American Studies Newsletter, U. of Wisconsin

More info on the MONKEY DANCE website

Press Information:

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