Driff Records Festival

Just got home from a great time at the Driff Records Festival, launching four new CDs.  I had never seen a drum trio before this one - with Curt Newton, Eric Rosenthal, and Luther Gray - and I loved it.  I found the music from Pandelis Karayorgis's new CD Cocoon concise, poetic, and beautifully played.  And this was the first time I heard my husband's new group BOLT, a high-energy dose of complex improvisation.

The format was fun, with five short sets in three hours, and breaks for drinks and snacks in between.  Looking forward to more "transatlantic improvisation" from Driff!

Associate Producer Minhae Shim

Congratulations to Minhae Shim on her recent graduation from UMass Boston!  Minhae has been working with us for two and a half years, doing everything from web design to assistant editing, copyediting, production assistance, and graphic design. And I'm very pleased that she is staying on at Julie Mallozzi Productions as Associate Producer.

Pictured above is Minhae's very cool installation Video Sasson, which she describes as "a phantasmagorical meditation on media, remediation, and the editing process. Discarded strips of videotape are repurposed to create a screen through which a digital video is projected. In the video, newly severed pieces of hair float across the screen to the tune of a familiar funeral ballad that has been rendered unrecognizable by the editing process. The work uses the inescapably human material of hair to comment on the omnipresence of media and its evolution, and to connect video editing to a familiar, tactile experience." I saw the piece at the Nowhere/No Here show at the Harbor Art Gallery in January, and loved its very concrete yet ethereal presence. Minhae's film Color Theory (co-directed with Danny Roth) won the 2013 Short Waves competition and will screen at the Boston Asian American Film Festival in October. In addition to her production work, Minhae is an active writer (see her recent piece in the Independent or her blog).

It's great to work with people you admire!

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!