Blog | Julie Mallozzi Productions

Final Music Recording

2011-12-23T21:23:00.004-05:00

The final details of Indelible Lalita are finally getting taken care of. On Wednesday we recorded the remaining music for the film with Brian Cass at Sounds Interesting Studio in Middleborough. Carla Kihlstedt (playing pump organ above, but mostly playing violin and voice) and Geni Skendo did a fantastic job... helped by great music by Jorrit Dijsktra (maybe I'm biased, since he's my husband).

In January we'll do our sound mix, followed by the online. Can't wait!

Marie-Emmanuelle Hartness Joins Us

2011-11-15T21:40:00.002-05:00

We're so pleased to have Marie-Emmanuelle Hartness joining us as consulting producer for Indelible Lalita. Marie is providing great feedback on cuts, and is helping with the film's distribution.

A specialist in the adaption of theater and film across multiple media and languages, Marie has been involved in films appearing in festivals of Cannes, Venice, Toronto, Prague, Paris, Clermont-Ferrand, and Locarno. Born in Paris, France, she completed research work at la Sorbonne in 2001, and has accumulated experience in various independent multimedia production formats, including screenwriting, literature, translation, television, theater and film. She has recently produced Ross McElwee’s new film Photographic Memory, which premiered at the 2011 Venice Biennale.

SAFE PLACE DVD now available

2011-11-02T21:52:00.001-04:00

The Spiral Foundation is now selling a DVD we produced of their SAFE PLACE workshop on parenting strategies for facilitating attachment and sensory regulation. Clinical psychologist Dan Hughes and occupational therapist/developmental psychologist Jane Koomar present an engaging, content-rich session for parents facing these issues.

College Success for Students in Hidalgo, TX

2011-10-27T15:49:00.007-04:00

School leaders in Hidalgo, Texas - a rural district of about 4,000 students near the Mexican border - made a commitment in 2005: all of their students would earn college credits before graduating from high school. Working with the Early College High School Initiative at Jobs for the Future (funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), they created a school system that focuses on preparing students for college - including English language learners, under-performing students, and those whose parents have little education themselves.

The district partners with local colleges, provides extensive support for individual students, and challenges students to take college-level courses. In the process, students are exposed to a "college-going culture," which eases their transition to higher education upon graduation.

By 2010, the first class graduated from Hidalgo Early College High School - two thirds of them with a semester or more of college credit. According to Jobs for the Future, Hidalgo's success is becoming a model for school districts around the country. There are currently 230 early college schools serving 50,000 students around the country.

I have just finished editing a video from existing material that gives a voice to the students' experience at this school. The video will be part of the Hidalgo Early College District Toolkit, designed to help other schools replicate Hidalgo's vision of college success for all.

Feedback from Harvard Students

2011-10-19T16:32:00.004-04:00

Many thanks to Ross McElwee for inviting me to show my work-in-progess of Indelible Lalita to his Intermediate Video Class at Harvard today. It was interesting to show the film to a young audience, and get some final feedback as I finish the project.

Audition for BU Student Films

2011-10-10T15:46:00.001-04:00

My Production I students are holding an audition for their final projects this semester (16 short films with minimal dialogue but hopefully strong visual storytelling) - please come if you are interested:

Thursday, Oct. 20, 6-9pm

640 Commonwealth Ave., Room 100

Boston, MA

Public Health Film Festival

2011-09-10T22:13:00.000-04:00

The American Public Health Association is holding the eighth annual APHA Film Festival at its annual meeting and exposition in DC this fall. My piece Shifting the Public Health Paradigm, produced last year for the Center for Health Equity and Social Justice at the Boston Public Health Commission, will be showing on Wednesday, November 2 at 12:30pm. (For all of you who happen to be attending the conference and happen to be free at that time!)

NAPT funds MY LOUISIANA LOVE

2011-09-07T21:57:00.005-04:00

We're so excited that Native American Public Telecommunications has just funded My Louisiana Love, a film by Sharon Linezo Hong that I am editing and co-producing. We're hoping this will mean a public television broadcast in 2012 or 2013.

My Louisiana Love traces a woman's quest to find a place in her Native American community as it reels from decades of environmental degradation. Monique Verdin returns to Southeast Louisiana to reunite with her Houma Indian family. But soon she sees that her people's traditional way of life - fishing, trapping, and hunting in these fragile wetlands - is threatened by a cycle of man-made environmental crises.

Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil leak are just the latest rounds in this century-old cycle that is forcing Monique's clan to adapt in new ways. Monique must overcome the loss of her house, her father, and her partner - and redefine the meaning of home.

Clarifying the Mission at Stand for Children

2011-08-01T22:00:00.001-04:00

I had the pleasure of working with Maria Daniels, Communications and Marketing Director for Stand for Children, on a short video for their staff retreat. This great organization works to ensure that all children, regardless of their background, have equal access to a good education. We made a video that presented Stand for Children's national vision - what animates their work in many different states, and where they see their work going.

Music for INDELIBLE LALITA

2011-07-12T15:00:00.010-04:00

Last Sunday we recorded music for my upcoming film, Indelible Lalita. The score was composed by my husband, Jorrit Dijkstra, and performed by Geni Skendo (flutes), Carla Kihlstedt (violin, voila, and voice), and her husband Matthias Bossi (piano, organ, percussion).

I'm really excited to cut the music into the film. It turned out to be a minimalistic but meaningful mix of long tones with Indian-style drones from the tampora and shruuti box.... definite influence from the great filmmker/composer Satyajit Ray. In the many months (years!) of editing this film, I had never thought that music would play much of a role - but in the end I feel that this score brings out the film's complex themes and raises it to a new level.

I loved the bends and twists in Geni's flute lines, and was thrilled by the late addition of some very cool instrumental voice from Carla. Audience members will have to listen hard to hear the delicate breaths and breaking tones; it may have more subconscious effect than conscious.

Thanks to all the musicians for a great day, and to our engineer Brian Cass of Sounds Interesting Studio in Middleboro, MA.

Zeega Ho!

2011-06-24T01:19:00.004-04:00

I'm totally in awe of the three Harvard affiliates - Jesse Shapins, James Burns, and Kara Oehler - who have just won the Knight News Challenge to develop a software called Zeega to make collaborative multimedia documentary-making easier. Sixteen projects by "journalism futurists" were chosen out of 2,500 submissions. The group will receive a stunning $420,000 of support.

The Harvard Gazette had a nice article about the prize announcement. Congratulations to Jesse, James, and Kara! We'll all be watching to see how your project develops.

Report from the Flaherty

2011-06-22T14:09:00.007-04:00

It’s our first big chunk of downtime at the Flaherty Seminar. We’ve seen some great work so far and started some interesting discussions.

Two discoveries for me are the work of Tan Pin Pin, who makes very authored films “exploring Singapore’s histories, contexts, and limits,” and that of Lillan Schwartz, a lovely woman in her 80s who was a pioneer in computer-generated art.

Pin Pin’s “Invisible City” moves between several subjects who are all passionate about uncovering and preserving aspects of Singapore before its modern present. Through the humor and tragedy, and the emerging details of the pre-colonial, polyglot past, we are left most of all with a deepened understanding of the human drive to memorialize.

Quebecois filmmaker Caroline Martel presented a work-in-progress of “Wavemakers,” a piece which also assembles a vast amount of detail in service of a higher filmmaking vision. In this case, it is the colorful history and technique of the Onde Martenot, one of the first electronic musical instruments. I really appreciated Caroline’s humane search for the “vital impulse” that inspires these engineers, composers, and musicians to find a way to translate sound into music.

Having been put into a dreamy space by Caroline’s film and a live Onde Martenot performance by one of the film’s subjects (Suzanne Binet-Audet), we were truly ready to receive Lillian Schwartz’s beautiful computer-generated films from around 1970. We watched some of them with ChromaDepth 3D glasses, which Lillian recently discovered have the effect of heightening the depth perception she was aiming to create in the films (having suffered from an eye condition which limited her own depth perception).

We’ve spent a lot of time in films and discussions, but I can’t say we haven’t also found some diversion – square dancing, Bill’s bar (named after Flaherty regular Bill Sloan), pickup soccer games, and a big bonfire on Monday night. As fellows we also enjoy daily lunches with the visiting filmmakers, including today with Sam Pollard. Among other topics, we discussed the distinction between conscious and sub-conscious acts of exclusion in filmmaking.

It’s been a great time so far. Some of us in the filmmaking contingent, though, are hoping that the remaining program will involve more inventive uses of sound, so that we can more deeply explore this year’s Seminar theme, Sonic Truth. There has been a preponderance of films about music, or films that contain mostly music and interview in the soundtrack. This has really limited discussion of sound recording and sound design technique.

57th Flaherty Opens

2011-06-18T17:06:00.009-04:00

I've arrived at the 57th annual Flaherty Seminar and just finished our first round of orientations for Fellows - about 28 interesting people coming from all over the U.S. (though Brooklyn is a little over-represented!) and Latin America. As I write, the other 100+ filmmakers, critics, and programmers are arriving - and our first happy hour begins soon. I'm looking forward to watching dozens of documentary films this week... and to the legendary discussions to follow.

One of the interesting topics of discussion today was whether Robert Flaherty - canonized as the first important documentary filmmaker - really was a documentary filmmaker at all. Of course everyone knows that he staged many of his scenes, Nanook wasn't actually married to his "wife," etc. But did Flaherty even consider himself a documentarian? Scott MacDonald, who led a session for us on the history of Flaherty and The Flaherty, pointed out that he really considered himself an experimental narrative filmmaker.

These categories obviously get redefined over the years, and are not always relevant. But it reminded me of a spirited part of the Celebration of Ricky Leacock I attended at MIT last week, in which Michel Negroponte lamented that the worlds of documentary filmmakers and avant-garde art filmmakers no longer overlapped so fruitfully as they once did. That Leacock, known so well for his contributions to Direct Cinema/Cinema Vérité, was truly open and appreciative to art films. These days I often meet "artists who work in film" who harbor a real disdain for documentaries, and documentarians who have had little exposure to fine art films - even though there is real overlap in the broad range of work in both categories.

(Something else Leacock and Flaherty shared, besides a collaborative relationship and an openness to art filmmaking: a love of women! Discussions of Flaherty's "international exchanges" that produced children all over the world echoed the stories about "the many women who loved Ricky"...)

Anyway, it's with a very open mind that we as Flaherty fellows are launching into this intense experience. I was excited to see a presentation by Caroline Martel of her installation investigating the connections between industrial films and mainstream narrative films - since I've also been exploring other forms for my film work, including installation.

12th and Delaware

2011-04-27T15:15:00.001-04:00

Docyard at the Brattle Theater showed a great film last night, 12th and Delaware, about an abortion clinic and a pro-life pregnancy care center on opposite sides of an intersection in Fort Pierce, Florida. It's a really well-crafted piece that handles a politically explosive topic with a light touch. I appreciated the way it was put together and the quiet, open approach the filmmakers (Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, of Jesus Camp fame) brought to their subjects.

It was also inspiring to see that a well-done musical score can really shape the aesthetic experience of an observational film without overdramatizing it (since I too often see films where I feel the music over-reaches its role).

Heidi Ewing did a Skype Q&A after the film, which she handled with intelligence and good humor despite what she called the "mad strange" feeling of talking into your digital device to an unseen audience of 100+ people.

Flaherty Fellowship

2011-04-26T16:04:00.004-04:00

I'm really excited to be attending this year's Robert Flaherty Film Seminar as a LEF New England fellow. I haven't been to the seminar in eight years and look forward to another vision-charging experience: seven days of pure documentary film absorbtion...

Artist Talk at MassArt Thursday

2011-04-25T11:35:00.001-04:00

This Thursday, April 28 I'll be giving an artist talk at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in their Thursday Night Lecture Series. The lecture begins at 6:30pm at 621 Hungtington Ave., Boston, in the Trustees Room (11th floor).

Children's Opera at Boston Conservatory

2011-04-24T11:42:00.004-04:00

Yesterday I took my daughters to a children's opera put on by students of Boston Conservatory. This is the second one we've been to - they put on this free program twice a year - and again it was a lot of fun. The show was "The Bremen Town Musicians," a new opera by John Davies based on a Grim Brothers tale and (humorously) set to well-known music by Rossini, Offenbach, Donizetti, Verdi, and Sullivan.

The students really put their all into the performance, and director Kirsten Z. Cairns knows how to present the program to make it enjoyable to adults and children alike. Thanks for the great time!

Rough Cut Screening April 14

2011-03-28T15:01:00.004-04:00

I will be screening a rough cut of my new film, Indelible Lalita, at the Center for Independent Documentary on Thursday, April 14 at 7pm. If you are interested in attending - and providing feedback to help me finish the film - please rsvp and get directions here.

Videojournalism Workshop at Harvard

2011-03-28T11:43:00.012-04:00

I had a great time over the weekend leading a videojournalism workshop at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. It was intense - trying to teach the basic concepts and technique of shooting and editing videos in just two days - but it was interesting to approach videomaking from this new angle. And I loved getting to know this group of very distinguished journalists from leading institutions all over the world.

Two discussions kept recurring during the course of the workshop. One was about the complex equipment and technique required to shoot professional videos, and the reality that most editors send their journalists out with a tiny point-and-shoot camera and no extra staff or time to produce a video story on top of their print story.

The other question was about how the professional and ethical standards of print journalism translate into motion picture media. Is it okay to hack up an interviewee's sentences, in order to condense a 30-minute interview into 90 seconds? Print journalism has the ellipsis (...) to indicate edits, but there is no equivalent in video.

It was a neat experience - helped greatly by my very able teaching assistant, Julie Reizes.

Fundraiser for Our Place

2011-03-26T14:36:00.002-04:00

A short video I produced was featured at a fundraising event for the Our Place Day Care Center for Homeless Children in Cambridge last night. The center, run by the Salvation Army, helps break the cycle of homelessness for families: while the children receive loving care and education, their parents can seek employment, job training, substance abuse counseling, or permanent housing.

The event was put on by the Cambridge Community of Real Estate Professionals, which has supported Our Place for 20 years. During the evening, Cambridge Mayor David Maher honored Majors Stephen and Betzann Carroll (above) for their decades of service to the Salvation Army. Congratulations on your retirement, Steve and Betzann!

Life in the Junkyard

2011-03-12T18:25:00.005-05:00

I was just in New York and caught the first night of MoMA's week-long presentation of Véréna Paravel and J.P. Sniadecki's Foreign Parts. It's a wonderful piece about the inhabitants of Willet's Point, a junkyard-filled industrial zone slated for demolition under New York's eminent domain rules.

I appreciated both the supreme craft - meticulously framed, confidently held shots and complex, subtle editing - and the humanity of this film. The filmmakers clearly developed strong relationships with their subjects ("many Corona beers," was J.P.'s answer to one audience member's question about this), and refrained from either sentimentality or judgement. The result is a film which truly puts us there, in the wet, muddy shoes of these folks who scrabble a creative existence from a pile of auto parts.

Congratulations Véréna and J.P.!

Chicken and Egg Pictures grant

2011-02-25T18:12:00.002-05:00

Chicken and Egg Pictures - a great "incubator" of social issue films by women filmmakers - just awarded Under Water's Mercy a grant from its WHICH CAME FIRST environmental film fund. We're very excited to be picking up speed as we bring the film to completion. Stay tuned for more information... including a final title!

Rough Cut Screening Thursday Feb. 24

2011-02-22T10:14:00.006-05:00

This Thursday evening the Center for Independent Documentary is hosting a rough cut screening of Under Water's Mercy, a film by Sharon Linezo Hong that I'm editing and co-producing. The film tells the story of a young Native American woman who returns to her family in Louisiana and finds a man-made environmental crisis threatening their way of life.

You may find information about the screening here.

Kickstarter Campaign a Success!

2011-02-22T09:31:00.004-05:00

I launched a Kickstarter campaign for my film Indelible Lalita - and I'm happy to report that we have reached our initial goal of $5,000 to cover sound editing and mixing.

With 26 days left to go, we're pushing to reach $10,000 to pay for some of the online editing and other completion costs. Please check it out and support the film!

Position Among the Stars... Great

2011-02-08T21:42:00.003-05:00

At last night's MassArt Film Society gathering, I had the chance to see the third film in Leonard Retel Helmrich's trilogy about a family in Jakarta, Position Among the Stars. The film has just won a Special Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. Well deserved. Leonard manages to combine a broad view of social and political issues, intimately observed narrative, and stunning visuals. Many filmmakers do two of these things, but few cover all three.

I especially respect the fact that Leonard shoots most of his own material. He stays close to his subjects and uses all kinds of camera supports he has designed himself. His mixed Dutch and Indonesian background allows him unique access to his subject matter and a connection with a wider audience. Congratulations Leonard!

Happy Lunar New Year!

2011-02-03T21:37:00.000-05:00

Best wishes for a healthy, happy Year of the Rabbit! We just sent our annual newsletter - if you didn't receive it you can see a copy (and subscribe) here.

Les 7 doigts de la main in Boston

2011-01-31T10:22:00.000-05:00

I'm becoming a big fan of Quebecois circus. Just took my girls to see the Boston debut of Les 7 Doigts de la Main (the Seven Fingers) - a great show set partly in a psychiatrist's office. Each of the cast members has a problem - insomnia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, narcissism - and has to trapeze, juggle, or flip their way to a solution.

I've seen a few shows by different groups, in Montréal, France, and now Boston. I love the way Quebecois circus seems to combine innovative theatre, dance, and traditional circus arts in shows with a very strong concept. The concept is clearly executed through set design, costuming, writing, music, and of course the performance itself. Every detail matters, and it adds up to an impressive show.

Negotiation Role Plays

2011-01-18T09:02:00.010-05:00

A project came my way that was outside my usual scope but very interesting nonetheless. Jim Golden, an attorney in Chattanooga, TN, asked me to produce two short role-play videos to demonstrate his signature negotiation method for early, humane, and reasonable settlement of accident and commercial disputes.

Jim calls his method the Negotiation Counsel Model®, and it involves in part opening up a second track of negotiation alongside the conventional litigation track. The hope is that the party that has been injured or offended can come to an agreement with the company early in the process – helping them save legal costs and move on with their lives, and helping the company avoid potentially years of depositions, document production, meetings, and/or a jury trial. When real empathy is involved – rather than threats, escalation, and manipulation – both sides’ humanity can be preserved and a mutually beneficial resolution reached.

Playing opposite Jim, as Claimant’s Counsel, was Tom Babson. When he introduced himself, I was sure he was an actual lawyer. Then I realized he was just a good actor, and fit the part – not to mention he played Sam Malone’s lawyer for six years on Cheers.

Dutch Sax Quartet Plays Indian-Influenced Music

2011-01-17T21:12:00.002-05:00

I was in Amsterdam last week and went to a great concert of the Amstel Quartet with guest Niti-Ranjan Biswas on tablas. The theme of the evening was the inspiration of Indian music – ragas, Bollywood music, Satyajit Ray’s music. There was a great atmosphere in that beautiful, historic hall (Felix Meritis). It amazes me what a thriving audience there is in Holland for creative music.

The Amstel Quartet is a very rigorous saxophone quartet coming from a classical background but playing a range of musical styles. My husband Jorrit Dijkstra played along for Shruut (clip above), a piece they commissioned from him that includes a plastic Shruti box droning along with the live music.

We also enjoyed a couple of weeks of biking over the canals and through the charming streets of Amsterdam (a bit too often in the pouring rain, I must admit). How I wish more of America’s cities were so bike-friendly.

Salvation Army Day Care Center piece

2011-01-06T16:01:00.007-05:00

The Cambridge Community of Realtors has just posted a video they asked me to make a couple of years ago about the Our Place Day Care Center for homeless children run by the Salvation Army in Cambridge. CCR supports Our Place in many ways. You can see the video here.

Traditional Chinese Wedding

2010-12-21T09:24:00.003-05:00

I donated a day of videography to my daughter’s Montessori school auction last spring, and it was given as a gift for a couple here in Quincy for their wedding day. I don’t normally film weddings – I don’t normally like to film weddings – but this one was special and I had a great time.

It was a traditional Chinese wedding in Quincy’s large Asian community. Lisa Chiu was marrying Hong Chao “Frankie” Zhong on a beautiful October day. I got to spend the day documenting the preparations, door games (the bridesmaids refuse to let the groomsmen through the door unless they complete a series of embarrassing tasks), Chinese tea ceremony (tea offerings and present exchange with all of the older relatives), photographs, reception, games, and dancing.

My colleague Shondra Burke edited the piece together into a 40-minute video for the family. It felt a little more like a documentary project than the usual cheesy wedding video. Lisa and Frankie were fun to work with, and let me post a little of the final result here.

BU Production I Screening

2010-12-11T16:39:00.004-05:00

Last night my Production I students at Boston University screened the short films they made in the second half of this semester. I am quite impressed with how quickly students progressed from knowing almost nothing about photography and filmmaking to confidently conceiving, writing, planning, shooting and editing compelling fiction films.

The fifteen pieces included Justin Geldzahler's comedic One Night Friend, about young man who goes home for the weekend hoping to bond with his little brother but finds himself making friends with an unlikely stranger instead; Michael Halpern's Crossing Paths (pictured above), about two men who pass each other every day without realizing their connection; and Danny Lim's Dreams for Sale, about a young man who seeks an unusual diversion from his job frying noodles in a Chinese restaurant.

Six Videos for Outside the Classroom

2010-11-30T17:18:00.002-05:00

This fall we produced six short outreach videos for the Alcohol Prevention Coalition run by Outside the Classroom. The videos incorporate Coalition member interviews with footage from their Annual Research Summit to explain the value of Coalition membership to higher education institutions.

It was a lot of fun working with this very well-organized group. And they were very pleased with the result. According to Brandon Busteed, Founder and CEO of Outside The Classroom, “Julie has an amazing vision for storytelling. She was able to connect with our clients, make them comfortable on camera, and capture incredibly thoughtful testimonials about partnering with our organization. The videos that she produced for us were viewed hundreds of times within the first few weeks of posting them on our website. They are more valuable than any piece of marketing collateral.”

Shifting the Public Health Paradigm

2010-11-03T10:41:00.007-04:00

We have recently completed a long-term documentation project for the Center for Health Equity and Social Justice at the Boston Public Health Commission. We spent over a year filming communities across New England in their work to decrease the disparities in health outcomes among residents of different ethnic and racial groups.

Our final video presents the Center's unique approach to collaborating with communities. Going beyond traditional "behavior modification" strategies, this approach includes an emphasis on mobilizing residents, addressing racism and the social determinants of health, and advancing long-term policy and systems change. It's about promoting social justice to improve public health.

Earlier this year, we also produced a trailer for the Center, with highlights from this video. Congratulations to the Center and their grantee partners for all their important work!

BU Student Film Audition

2010-10-25T19:03:00.002-04:00

My Production I class at Boston University will be holding auditions for their final films this week:

Thursday, October 28, 5-8pm
640 Commonwealth Ave, Room 100
Boston, MA

We are seeking actors and actresses of all ages to perform in fifteen 3-6 minute films. Shooting will take place November 9-18 and will involve 1 or 2 shoots per film. This is an unpaid gig, but we will provide food and a copy of the finished film.

Please email buprod353@gmail.com if you have any questions.

Housing Choice Video

2010-10-25T18:49:00.005-04:00

The Maine Affordable Housing Coalition, in collaboration with several other organizations, has just released a powerful video sharing the stories of several families whose lives have been changed by public housing support.

The piece, Along the Way Home, aims to bring public attention to the housing needs of lower income people and highlight successful models for addressing those needs. It was produced by Maine-based Pull-Start Pictures, and can be seen on YouTube or on its website.

Please help spread the word about this video and its important message.

Monkey Dance in Peterborough, NH

2010-10-12T14:39:00.000-04:00

Monkey Dance will be screening at the Mariposa Museum and World Culture Center on Friday, October 22 at 7pm as part of a special exhibit on the cultures of Southeast Asia.

Rooftop Films Rocks!

2010-09-23T09:05:00.001-04:00

I had a great time with the Under Water's Mercy team watching trailers from 20 great projects - narrative and documentary - that were part of the IFP Independent Filmmaker Labs this summer.

The docs were especially strong, including Dear Mandela, about three young slum dwellers who refuse to be evicted from their homes in one of Durban's sprawling shantytowns; 25 to Life, about an HIV-positive man who seeks redemption from the women of his promiscuous past; and Smokin' Fish, about a young Tlingit Indian man who makes a pilgrimage to rural Alaska to spend a summer living off the land.

The show was part of IFP Film Week, and was put on outdoors along the Hudson River in New York City by Rooftop Films. I had barely heard of Rooftop Films before this, and now I'm a huge fan! "Underground Movies Outdoors"... we hope we'll have a chance to screen Under Water's Mercy this way when we're done.

It has been a productive and fun week at IFP's Independent Film Week - a real powerhouse of an event.

Last Train Home

2010-09-13T22:40:00.003-04:00

I just got home from seeing Lixin Fan's Last Train Home, which follows one family among the 130 million migrant factory workers in China. It's a powerful film which manages to capture something of the broad sweep of humanity and the intimate struggles of this one family. It did seem a bit contrived at times, but I recognize the challenges of filming in China and certainly forgive the filmmakers for doing what they did to knit together their story.

The film was showing at the Brattle Theatre as the last of this season's Docyard screenings, which help build our Boston documentary filmmaking community. After the screening, the filmmaker skyped in for a Q&A (pictured above).

It was great reconnecting with old friends, including Jesse Shapins, a PhD student at the Harvard Graduate Student of Design who is also an urban media theorist, documentary artist, and social entrepreneur. When I worked at Harvard's Film Study Center last year, we helped Jesse and his classmate Olga Touloumi curate A Media Archaeology of Boston - which pulled together media representations of the Boston area landscape over the last 100+ years. Thanks to all their effort, it was a great show - ranging from stuttery 1901 movies of Boston streetcars, to cheesy 1980s fiction films, to a black-and-white documentary on the Boston Marathon and a promotional video featuring the mayor of Somerville jogging through the city streets.

Jesse has just started co-teaching A Media Archaeology of Place, which looks to be a fascinating course "exploring different modes of representing place." I'm looking forward to seeing the final output of this class, which will be accessible to the public on a map-based website.

Under Water's Mercy at IFP

2010-09-09T21:55:00.000-04:00

I'm very excited to be heading to New York for Independent Film Week (what they used to call the IFP Market) with Under Water's Mercy, a film I'm co-producing and editing with Sharon Linezo Hong and Monique Verdin. This will be our first public exposure for the film.

Under Water's Mercy tells the story of a young Native American woman who returns to her Houma community in Southeast Louisiana and finds it threatened by environmental disaster. As her loved ones suffer displacement, illness, and even suicide, she finds a sense of purpose as a storyteller for her people.

Critique Class at MassArt

2010-08-19T22:00:00.005-04:00

This fall I'll be teaching The Filmmaker's Project at MassArt's Continuing Education program. It's an advanced critique class for filmmakers who are working on a piece and are looking for some structure (i.e. deadlines!) and feedback from a consistent teacher/classmate group. We will discuss structural, thematic, and fine editing issues, and engage in more philosophical conversations about what it means to make a film. I will also lead occasional workshops on the technical and professional aspects of post-production.

My students last spring came pretty far with their own projects, and seemed to learn from identifying issues in other students’ films, and watching those films evolve in the critique process.

The course begins September 9 and is still open for enrollment. It meets Thursdays 7-10pm.

JP Youth Gather for Health Equity

2010-08-19T20:47:00.004-04:00

I enjoyed filming a gathering of young people in Jamaica Plain to talk about what they can do to help close the gap in health outcomes between different ethnic and socioeconomic groups. The meeting was organized by Jamaica Plain Youth Health Equity Collaborative, a dynamic grassroots group run out of the Southern Jamaica Plain Health Center.

The Collaborative is working on several fronts to address the structural roots of health inequality. They are currently focusing on youth employment - both on the policy level to preserve funding for youth jobs, and in developing a youth-run business. They also published a great report to educate young people in Jamaica Plain about the complex causes of health disparities.

It's been fun meeting several articulate new leaders in JP, and the health center's Manager of Community Health Programs, Abigail Ortiz (pictured above, leading a role play). She knows how to keep a room full of young people engaged and cooperating on ambitious projects for their community's future.

Tom Wolff wrote a nice article in his newsletter about the Youth Collaborative's work, and that of one of their funders, the Center for Health Equity and Social Justice at Boston Public Health Commission (who has hired me to document some of their grantees).

100 Days Post-Spill

2010-07-28T11:40:00.011-04:00

It's now been 100 days since BP's oil rig exploded, killing 11 rig workers and setting off a massive crude oil leak. Thankfully, the cap on the well seems to be holding, and if all goes according to plan (a big IF), a relief well will soon enable a permanent end to the spill. Of course, the estimated 92 million gallons of oil that have already leaked into the Gulf of Mexico will continue to affect the area's wildlife, vegetation, and economy for years.

The oil spill also threatens to end indigenous people's ability to live off Louisiana's land and water, as they have for hundreds of years.

I am co-producing and editing a film called Under Water's Mercy that follows one Native American family's struggle to maintain their traditional way of life alongside oil and gas industries in Southeast Louisiana. The film is directed by Sharon Linezo Hong, and shot by her and Monique Verdin (who also made the photo above on the Pointe au Chien Bayou). In the film, Monique returns to her Houma community as they face a series of manmade environmental disasters, and gradually finds a sense of purpose as a photographer and storyteller for her people.

This fall, we'll be meeting with potential funders, broadcasters, and distributors who could help us get the film out into the world.

Alcohol Prevention Front and Center

2010-06-25T10:17:00.010-04:00

Earlier this week I found myself immersed in the research and strategies for preventing high-risk drinking at colleges. Outside the Classroom asked me to film their Alcohol Prevention Coalition's second Annual Research Summit at Babson College. It's a gathering of top administrators, health educators, and student affairs directors who work to minimize binge drinking and its ramifications such as sexual assault, poor academic performance, and damaged town-gown relationships.

I am excited to be working with Outside the Classroom because I find them to be not only a top-notch research and strategy organization, but a great example of social entrepreneurship. They seem to be a for-profit business that operates with a non-profit mission. Their website says they aim to "Run Like a Business ~ Act Like a Nonprofit ~ Feel Like a Family ~ Care to Be Better."

Founder and CEO Brandon Busteed (pictured above) described the complexity of their approach to alcohol prevention, which brings together a diverse range of partners - deans, athletic directors, student affairs officers, health educators, student groups, faculty, and Greek organizations - and uses the Coalition's rich data on student attitudes and behavior to design policy.

I'm looking forward to producing some webclips to get the word out about the Coalition.

Mattapan Moving for Life

2010-06-18T20:24:00.006-04:00

On Saturday I had the opportunity to attend and film Mattapan Moving for Life, an an annual event to encourage healthy physical activity for residents of all ages. There was hula hooping and tai chi, zumba and double dutch, and free healthy food from Brookwood Community Farm and other vendors.

Mattapan Food and Fitness Coalition, the sponsoring organization, hopes that this and their many other programs will help change the daunting health statistics of this community; Mattapan has some of the highest rates of obesity and diabetes in Boston. The roots of this disparity lie in deep socioeconomic factors, from lack of access to healthy food to unsafe streets and playgounds (or sometimes just the perception of danger) to systemic racism.

The Coalition's vision is that "Mattapan will become known as one of the healthiest communities in Boston, with easy access to affordable and healthy food. Our streets will be clean, safe and walk-able. Our residents of all ages and abilities will take regular advantage of the abundant and inviting play spaces and recreational opportunities."

I was shooting the event with one of my favorite cameramen, Thomas Danielczik, as part of a two-year documentation project for the Boston Public Health Commission. Congratulations to Mattapan for a great community event!

Springtime Shoot in Paris

2010-06-02T13:28:00.006-04:00

I just got back from a nice shoot in Paris for my Lalita film. I have now filmed in all three cities Lalita has lived: Mumbai, Paris, and Montréal. My film partly has to do with the ways our bodies are shaped or affected by the places we live. So I was looking for images that feel in some ways quintessentially Paris - and yet are not cliché... for some reason, I found that shooting on my cheap little Flip camera yielded some interesting results.

On the sightseeing part of the trip, I also enjoyed visiting the Mosquée de Paris, where in addition to seeing the beautiful tilework and gardens, you can get a full hammam treatment with steam baths, black soap, and muscular old ladies massaging you down with scented oil...

First Showing of Lalita Installation

2010-05-20T13:51:00.001-04:00

I had the first public showing of my Lalita installation at Herbst Pavilion, Fort Mason in San Francisco last week as part of San Francisco Art Institute's graduating MFA show. It was a great experience to build a room and deal with all the technical details for a two-channel HD video projection. (Thanks a million to musicians-turned-builders Jorrit Dijkstra and Matthias Bossi for the help!) I also had the opportunity to show the piece to artist Nalini Malani, who was receiving an honorary doctorate from SFAI, and Johan Pijnappel, a Dutch curator living in Mumbai and specializing in Asian video and new media art.

Royal Toast CD out today

2010-05-18T15:57:00.005-04:00

My friend John Hollenbeck, a great drummer/composer, is releasing a new CD today called Royal Toast. The album features his Claudia Quintet together with Gary Versace on piano. My colleague John Harrison and I pulled together some existing footage of the band to make a little Youtube video to help launch the CD.

John Hollenbeck was nominated for a Grammy last year, and continues prolifically to produce some very interesting music. He plays in several groups in addition to the Claudia Quintet, including a duo with my husband Jorrit Dijkstra on saxophone and electronics.

New Health Equity Video

2010-05-05T13:27:00.002-04:00

The Center for Health Equity and Social Justice at the Boston Public Health Commission just launched a video trailer we produced about their work to eliminate health disparities among different racial and ethnic groups. The Center funds dynamic projects around New England that focus on the social determinants of health, community engagement and mobilization, and long-term systemic change.

MFA Graduate Exhibition in San Francisco

2010-04-27T21:30:00.004-04:00

I'm getting my Masters of Fine Arts degree from San Francisco Art Institute next month and will be presenting a new piece at two shows (below). Lalita tells the story of a resilient woman whose body has been remarkably transformed by loss of skin pigment, cancer, and other conditions. The piece explores the idea of the body as an archive, onto which one’s experiences are imprinted over the course of a life. Lalita Bharvani is a quintessential global citizen whose body seems to respond to her feelings about crossing national and cultural frontiers.

MFA GRADUATE EXHIBITION

San Francisco Art Institute

Herbst Pavilion, Fort Mason

Marina Boulevard at Buchanan Street

San Francisco, CA 94123

May 15-22, 12-6pm daily

Opening Reception: Vernissage

Friday, May 14, 6-8pm

* I will be showing a 2-channel installation of LALITA*

GRADUATE STUDENT FILM SCREENING

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 3rd Street
San Francisco, CA 94103

Sunday, May 16 4-6:30pm

* I will be showing a 15-minute excerpt of my LALITA film (work in progress) *

Monkey Dance in NYC April 27

2010-04-11T17:42:00.006-04:00

My film Monkey Dance is showing at Anthology Film Archives in New York. It will be preceded by two short films:Underpass by Rain Breaw, and Chinese Dumplings by Michelle Hung.

Tuesday, April 27, 7:00pm
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue (at 2nd Street)
New York, New York

The Body as an Archive of Experience

2010-03-12T08:20:00.004-05:00

I just posted an entry on the Mass Humanities blog, the Public Humanist, about a topic I am exploring in my LALITA film: the body as an archive of our experience...

Pearl Art closes in Central Square

2010-02-18T10:59:00.001-05:00

I was sad to see that Pearl Art & Craft was closing its Central Square branch...

SFMOMA 75th Anniversary

2010-01-28T10:55:00.009-05:00

I was in San Francisco recently and attended the celebration weekend for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's 75th Anniversary show. Wow. Seems like every major artist working in America in the last hundred years is on display, with multiple pieces. And they had 75 artists, critics, and curators giving 7.5-minute talks about specific works of art throughout the museum. Artist Tony Labat (above) spoke about Howard Fried's super-8 film installation (presented in video) Inside the Harlequin: Approach-Avoidance III and II. An interesting piece in which one actor has the ability to cross the frame divide, and the other does not...

Videos on Leadership Institute Posted

2010-01-22T16:01:00.004-05:00

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation has just posted three videos I produced for them on their multimedia page. The videos feature three alumni of the Massachusetts Institute for Community Health Leadership at their workplaces reflecting on how the Institute experience impacted their work. Their supervisors also speak to their improved effectiveness on the job. It was a pleasure working with the Foundation and the three featured alumni on these pieces. You can also see the clips on my site: about Joe Iannelli of Massachusetts General Hospital, Lindsey Tucker of Health Care for All, and Jennifer Chow of Blue Cross Blue Shield of MA Foundation. Thanks to all three for their generous participation in the project!

First Annual Newsletter

2010-01-22T10:46:00.002-05:00

We just sent our first annual Julie Mallozzi Productions newsletter to friends and colleagues. Please join our mailing list if you are interested in receiving future updates.

New Installation Page on Site

2010-01-06T15:27:00.000-05:00

We've just added a new section to my website with information about the art installations I've begun making in the last year and a half. My first work of public art, 60.30.1 (pictured above in a photo by Matt Stacey), was set at 11 sites on Harvard University's campus in December 2008. In the summer of 2009, I took a great installation course from Felipe Dulzaides at San Francisco Art Institute and further explored this avenue of work. I see it as an interesting way to develop and present my ideas about the intersections between cultures, histories, and time.

MassArt Class Screening December 17, 7pm

2009-12-12T21:20:00.006-05:00

This semester I taught a Continuing Education course at MassArt modeled after the second semester of an intro film course I taught twice at Harvard. It's called "Group Documentary," and (as you might guess) involves all of the students collaborating on one film. By working together, students are able to learn from each other and to create a more ambitious project than they could individually. And it's a great opportunity to learn about collaboration in one of the most collaborative of art forms.

My class had only three students, which made it quite a heavy workload for them. They chose a compelling subject (though one which - by total coincidence - was for me uncomfortably similar to that of my last feature doc, Monkey Dance): the Gund Kwok Asian Women Lion and Dragon Dance Troupe based in Boston's Chinatown. They chose to focus on three dancers. What emerges is an interesting story about how this traditionally male dance form helps its members balance work, motherhood, and their own passions.

Please join us for our class screening on Thursday, December 17 at 7pm in Film Screening Room 1 at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, 621 Huntington Ave., Boston. Refreshments will be served.

Post on the Public Humanist Blog

2009-11-09T19:59:00.006-05:00

I just posted a blog entry on the Public Humanist - Musings on the Filmmaker-Subject Relationship. I also started twittering on Saturday - follow me at juliemallozzi. (Sometime soon I'll figure out how to get the Twitter gadget on my blog page.)

Monkey Dance in Amherst November 15

2009-11-07T10:24:00.004-05:00

My film Monkey Dance will be showing at University of Massachusetts, Amherst together with a performance by Angkor Dance Troupe on Sunday, November 15 at 3pm. I will be there to do a Q&A, along with one or two of the subjects of the film. Click here for info and tickets.

Han Bennink Inspires

2009-11-01T21:45:00.006-05:00

I had an inspiring evening on October 27, seeing Dutch percussionist Han Bennink - a legend in European free jazz / improvised music circles. I've heard Han play before, introduced by my husband (saxophonist Jorrit Dijkstra), but he certainly impressed me anew. A lanky, white-haired man in his late 60s playing with such a high level of energy, intensity, and humor... it convinces me again that half of being a good artist is remaining committed to one's ideas, carrying them through as purely and consistently as possible.

Dynamic Report on After School Time

2009-10-20T22:26:00.004-04:00

I was just looking at the website of one of my clients - the Massachusetts Special Commission on After School and Out of School Time - and noticed that they had done a great job integrating the several videos I made for them in an interactive report. The report includes data, anecdotal evidence, and videos about the importance of after school activities for the state's children. I produced video interviews with the Commission co-chairs, portraits of three strong after school programs, and a montage of testimonies from several hearings across the state.

Very satisfying to see the media I produced being put to good use, in an accessible way.

In Memoriam Sokhorn Sem

2009-10-09T16:16:00.008-04:00

I am sad to report that Sokhorn Sem, mother of Monkey Dance film subject Samnang Hor, passed away on October 4 after a long battle with cancer. Services were at the Khmer Temple (Wat Triratanaram) in Chelmsford yesterday and today. A survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide, Sokhorn worked for years at Cambridge Tool and as a wedding planner. She leaves behind a large and loving family, including Samnang, his wife Yary Na, and their daughter Jarronai.

Labor & Dreams Festival

2009-10-05T09:45:00.012-04:00

My short video 25th & Mission will show at San Francisco Video Fest Thursday, October 15 at 8pm, at Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, 2868 Mission Street, San Francisco (around the corner from where the piece was shot).

And while we're talking about 25th & Mission, here are some pictures of the installation version of this piece, that ran August 4-10 in 25th Street Cleaners:

Capitalism Sold Out

2009-10-04T10:13:00.000-04:00

Went to see Michael Moore's new film, Capitalism: A Love Story, last night. Amused by the sign we saw upon arrival (luckily, we had bought our tickets online).

Documenting the Struggle for Health Equity

2009-09-15T16:20:00.005-04:00

I'm very excited to be working with the Center for Health Equity & Social Justi ce at the Boston Public Health Commission on a multi-year documentation project of their fantastic work towards eliminating racial and ethnic health disparities. We're starting off with filming their New England Health Equity Summit September 23-25, 2009 - a second gathering of community leaders from around the region around this issue.

Video and Pie in a Laundromat

2009-07-20T19:15:00.008-04:00

My other upcoming show is an installation of my video 25th and Mission in the laundromat where it was partially filmed: 25th Street Dry Cleaners, 3416 25th Street (at Mission), San Francisco. The show will be up August 4-10, with an opening reception Wednesday, August 5, 5-7pm (when else can you have wine and cheese and Mission Pie pie in a laundromat)?

The piece looks abstractly at what the four delightfully diverse shops on this block have in common: namely, a rootedness in their community and the work of transforming and beautifying surfaces.

The Space Between Hours

2009-07-20T18:37:00.011-04:00

I have two shows of new video installations coming up in the next few weeks. The first is The Space Between Hours at Diego Rivera Gallery at San Francisco Art Institute, 800 Chestnut Street, San Francisco. The show will be up July 26-31, with an opening reception on Tuesday, July 28 from 5-7pm (artist talk at 4:30pm).

The show is with Emily Terhune Korson and Elizabeth Pedinotti. All of the work is autobiographical in some way, and explores our ability or inability to fully experience and remember moments in our lives. My piece Breakfast is the first public installation of an ongoing project to record one minute of my family's breakfast every day. The piece in the Diego Gallery includes five seconds of each day of the first seven months of this year, projected onto a mylar sheet hanging from the gallery's 50-foot ceiling.

I'm not sure how many other opportunities I'll have to show my work in the same gallery as a Diego Rivera mural.

Principals Toolkit Complete

2009-07-01T14:20:00.006-04:00

I have just finished producing the DVD for CAYL Institute’s Principals Toolkit, to help school leaders design, implement, and supervise quality early childhood education. We made seven videos and four slideshows covering topics such as Relationships, Environment, Family & Community, District Advocacy, and Supervision.

I really learned a lot about what goes into a high quality education for young children – information that I can use both professionally and personally, as my older daughter enters kindergarten this fall and my younger daughter starts preschool.

The Toolkit will be released at CAYL’s National Principals Conf erence July 12-15, 2009.

24" Moss Planter

2009-06-29T13:48:00.001-04:00

I’m taking a really fun installation class at San Francisco Art Institute this summer with Felipe Dulzaides. We had an assignment to “activate a space” last week and I did a little installation in the woods (documentation above). Unfortunately it got a little panned in my critique, but I'm working on several more in-depth projects that may go over better.

Monkey Dance in Cairo

2009-06-06T00:28:00.005-04:00

My film Monkey Dance will play at the Refugee Film Festival in Cairo, Egypt on Friday, June 19. With Arabic subtitles!

SFAI Vernissage

2009-05-27T10:00:00.005-04:00

I was in San Francisco last week for my classmates' MFA show at Fort Mason. It was quite a spectacle, with around 100 artists showing their wares in a huge waterfront warehouse space with ceilings that must have been at least 50 feet high.

JD Beltran wrote a good blog post about the show in the San Francisco Chronicle. One of the pieces I especially enjoyed was Brandon Truscott's orchestrate entropy (pictured above), in which he arrayed parts of a disassembled piano, retired household gadgets, and other detritus of civilization in a plinth formation with a white-shrouded baby doll suspended on an invisible thread from that high ceiling. It's one of those rare pieces that combines a great concept with a very strong technical execution.

MassArt Student Screening May 9

2009-05-03T14:04:00.006-04:00

Next Saturday, May 9 at 7pm, students from my Intermediate Video: Style and Practice class at Massachusetts College of Art and Design will be showing their films. Despite having full-time jobs, families, or other commitments, these Continuing Ed students have taken on ambitious projects - so ambitious, actually, that most of them exceed what can be done in one semester's work. So we decided to invite a few friends and hold it as a work-in-progress screening. (The public is welcome if you don't mind films that are still in formation!)

There are intriguing intersections in my students' lives and the themes of their non-fiction films, namely: life-threatening accidents that cause major changes, and women in the second half of life finding new direction. Plus one piece that defies these two categories: a revelatory "exit interview" of a young white woman finishing a year as a VISTA volunteer in a Chinatown cultural group.

A Media Archaeology of Boston

2009-04-22T21:44:00.002-04:00

Tomorrow night at 7pm at the Harvard Film Archive there's going to be a dig into 100 years of cinema representation of Boston - from early silent panoramas of the new subway lines to government films, Hollywood blockbusters, 8mm art pieces, 1950s commercials, and YouTube clips. I co-curated A Media Archaeology of Boston with Jesse Shapins and Olga Touloumi of Harvard's Graduate School of Design and Ernst Karel of the Film Study Center. It's the opening event of Cambridge Talks, an annual symposium that brings together scholars in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning. This year's symposium theme is "Mediated Space."

Still a Monkey Dancer

2009-04-09T10:33:00.007-04:00

My family and I went to the Angkor Dance Troupe's annual fundraiser last weekend, and I was happy to catch up with all three young people featured in my film Monkey Dance - Linda Sou, Sochenda Uch, and Samnang Hor. All three are living in Lowell after finishing college, and giving back to their community in different ways.

I was especially pleased to see that Linda is now Assistant Artistic Director of the troupe, and Samnang is still dancing swa pol, the monkey dance - along with his new roles as Lowell High School algebra teacher, gymnastic coach, husband, and .... father! He and his wife had a baby girl five months ago. Congratulations to their family!

LOCALITY Show in San Francisco April 2-16

2009-03-25T13:57:00.005-04:00

My short video 25th & Mission will be in a group show called Locality at the Mission Arts Center, 2183 Mission Street (between 17th & 18th), San Francisco. The opening party is April 2, 8-11pm, and the closing party is April 16, 8-11pm. Unfortunately I won't be there personally.

I made the seven-minute video, which will play in a loop on a monitor, during my first summer of three living in the Bay Area. The piece was inspired by my family's three-week stay at a friend's studio apartment (international tango artist Hung-yut Chen).

What begins as abstract fields of color gradually emerges to be a portrait of four tiny shops in a block of San Francisco’s Mission district. They are as diverse as the community around them: a Chinese-run laundry, a Salvadoran hair salon, a hipster tattoo parlor, an art gallery. As the camera hovers inches from its subjects, we realize that the seemingly disparate shops are linked not only by their location but also by their inhabitants’ loving attention to the beautification of the varied surfaces they work with.

Making Your Media Matter conference

2009-02-18T13:43:00.003-05:00

I was in DC last week for the annual Making Your Media Matter conference hosted by AU's Center for Social Media. It was my first experience sitting in an audience of hundreds of people with laptops open, all surfing the web, emailing, and tweeting reports about the conference as it happened.

George Stoney (above), 87 years old and still making films, spoke on ethics in social issue film. It was also great hearing from Alice Myatt from Grantmakers in Film & Electronic Media about their amazing online database to help connect film projects with funders.

Most of the talk was about outreach for social documentaries. Ages ago, filmmakers would make a film THEN think about its audience. In the past ten years or so, we've learned that it's good to start your outreach as you are making the film. But one of the big messages of this conference was that now you should start building the audience for your film before you even shoot a frame. Facebook, Twitter, and Blog away!

Sensory Ethnography at Harvard

2009-02-06T09:13:00.014-05:00

Last night was the annual screening of works from the Sensory Ethnography class in the departments of Anthropology and Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard. It was an impressive and totally engaging four hours of films taking us from Sudan to Sibera, Quebec to Canary Islands, and Mumbai to Queens.

This full-year course, taught by Professor Lucien Castaing-Taylor and teaching assistant Jeff Daniel Silva, provides graduate (and some undergraduate) students from many different disciplines "intensive training in video production and film studies, with a critical emphasis on exploring alternative approaches to an ethnographic art practice." This fall I served as Interim Lab Manager of the Sensory Ethnography Lab, which supports the course.

Several of the nine films really struck me. Alex Fattal's Beneath Trees Tropiques took us on a 30-minute visit to an island in the mouth of the Amazon basin, where families survive in part by chainsawing down the forest where they live. The film was visually captivating, from its opening — a sustained low-angle shot from a dugout canoe paddled by a restless teenager — to its metaphorical closing on an unusual beast hanging tenuously between two trees. But more than the visuals, I appreciated the piece's warm humanity, capturing the subtle decision-making of fathers trying to support their families, teens choosing between studies and soccer, and women navigating their own roles in a world defined by men. These very particular, yet universal, themes interacted quite interestingly with Alex's investigation into "the ethics of deforestation and documentary practice."

Alexander Berman's Songs from the Tundra introduced us to the "awkward modernity" of the Even people in Russia's remote Kamchatka Peninsula — a reality in which reindeer herding and ancestral folk songs intersect with Cold-War era tanks and three-year-olds playing computer games. Fatin Abbas's Mud Missive looked at a group of potters in Khartoum, Sudan, and reflected on her own ideas of self and nation.

On the homepage of Harvard's Department of Anthropology, you can see a map of the far-flung research interests of its social anthropology graduate students (and mention of a chance to see more Sensory Ethnography works at the Peabody Museum on February 11). Of all the films on faraway lands in last night's screening, it was Verena Paravel's 7 Queens that discovered the most exotic characters — on a long walk beneath the elevated tracks of New York's #7 subway line. Maybe it takes a Frenchwoman to help us see our ourselves through an ethnographic lens.

One side note to this memorable evening: I was curious whether it was a coincidence that almost all of the screen time in these pieces, especially in the audio tracks, was centered on men and boys. Does this say anything about how ethnographic makers gain access to a community? Or is it just coincidence?

In any case, it was a wonderful conclusion to the fall semester at Harvard, coming after my last day of work at the Film Study Center and Sensory Ethnography Lab. Congratulations to all of the students, and to Lucien and Jeff! And welcome back to Harvard, Ernst Karel (who did great sound mixes for these films).

Family & School Partnerships

2009-01-28T13:18:00.004-05:00

On the evening of Inauguration Day I went to CAYL Institute's annual gathering of people who work in and advocate for the field of early childhood care and education. It was a festive event - a great chance for people from all over the state to catch up on what they are doing.

CAYL also gave a sneak preview of the Principal's Toolkit I am helping them produce, to help elementary school principals incorporate best practices with young children in their schools. We showed a 7-minute video from the Toolkit - the section on Family and School Partnerships:

Bevels and Videos

2009-01-19T17:03:00.003-05:00

I just got back from winter review at my MFA program at San Francisco Art Institute. Aside from marvelling at the improbable weather there, I find it enlightening to show my work to artist colleagues who paint, sculpt, and perform their work. In one review, we spent a good deal of time talking about the meaning of two paintings' bevelled edges.

The Muistardeaux Collective - which consists of Eric Gibbons, Tom Borden, and Khyssup Muistardeaux (their non-existent collaborator from French Guiana) - launched an ambitious and hilarious performance for their review. See video below.

Not Just Inauguration Day

2009-01-14T15:59:00.003-05:00

Tuesday, January 20 will be an exciting day not just because of the Inauguration. It's also the celebration of CAYL Institute's official re-branding launch. CAYL Institute, or Community Advocates for Young Learners, works to have high quality early education and care embedded in public policy and professional practice. It's the new umbrella organization housing several well-known fellowships, including CAYL Schott Fellowship in Early Care and Education, and the CAYL Prinicpals Fellowship in Early Care and Education.

I just finished producing a 7-minute video to show at the event. The video is about the importance of strong partnerships between families and schools, including culturally competent practices. It is part of a Principals' Toolkit CAYL and I are putting together to help public school principals adapt to the influx of 3-5 year olds in their schools. I also produced a video about the Schott Fellowship in 2006.

Tuesday's event will be hosted by Luis A. Hernandez and will include a performance by the Frederick Hayes Dance Company of Roxbury. The event is open to the public and takes place January 20, 2009, 6-9pm at Cambridge College (1000 Massachusetts Ave. Room 152, Cambridge MA).

An Interesting Show at Bard College

2008-12-30T15:32:00.017-05:00

This month we took a group of Harvard graduate students and Film Study Center fellows to see an exhibition at Bard College's Center for Curatorial Studies called Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art. We attended a talk by Walid Raad, and had a personal walkthrough of the show with curator Maria Lind.

The exhibition includes hundreds of works in photography, film, video, and installation in which artists use documentary practices to try to "touch 'the real'," as Lind explains in the exhibition guide.

I was especially moved by Yael Bartana's installation Summer Camp, in which she depicts Israeli, Palestinian, and international volunteers rebuilding destroyed Palestinian houses in the occupied territories - juxtaposed with a soundtrack drawn from Zionist propaganda films of the 1930s and 40s. The main video is projected right onto the bare plywood walls of the installation, which emit a smell that puts you in the space of the new houses. In one corner a Zionist film plays on a small monitor. I think the installation is a nice execution of a strong concept.

I also enjoyed several pieces that artistically recreate documents from important events. In My Neck is Thinner than a Hair: Engines, Walid Raad/Atlas Group impeccably cropped, printed, framed, and labeled 100 photographs of car engines blasted into neighborhoods in Lebanon by car bombs between 1975 and 1991. As in Raad's other work, the boundaries between fact and fiction are blurred as the provenance and authenticity of some of the photographs are in question. Nathan Coley's Lockerbie Witness Box and Lockerbie Evidence recreate evidence from the trial of the two Libyans accused of bombing Pan Am flight 103. For Inbox, Palestinian artist Emily Jacir meticulously handpainted dozens of personal, political, and spam emails she sent and received over the course of five years.

I was somewhat inexplicably entranced by Mark Raidpere's video installation 10 Men, which projects an 8-minute loop of 10 inmates in an Estonian prison simply posing for the camera one by one in front of a blue wall, to an accompanying music box melody. My colleagues and I had a lively discussion about whether this piece abused or exploited its subjects - and whether the piece would have been as captivating had they not been prison inmates.

The works and our conversations made it clear that the exhibition takes very much an art-world perspective on the documentary form. The show limits itself to presenting the use of documentary practices by artists - as defined by curators of museums, art shows, and galleries. There were thousands of works to consider in this category, and it makes for a rich show. But coming from the documentary film tradition myself, I felt the absence of reference to the 150-plus years of photography, film, and video using these practices. It was as if the artists in the show had "discovered" the use of observation, interviews, archival material, recreations, and sound juxtapositions; yet documentary artists have been using, and subverting, these forms for a long time.

I realize that the breadth of documentary history was beyond the scope of this exhibit, also because the show focused on contemporary artists. It's just interesting to feel the palpable division between the art world and the film/video world - despite the fact that many filmmakers consider themselves artists, and many artists make films.

In any case, the show was really interesting and we all learned a lot. Plus, we had a delicious dinner afterwards at Terrapin Restaurant in nearby Rhinebeck.

60.30.1 Opening

2008-12-08T22:05:00.009-05:00

The 60.30.1 Installation opened at Harvard University today - in fact, we set the whole thing up today. Dean Michael Smith officially launched the show, along with Jacqueline Bhabha of the University Committee on Human Rights Studies and several student groups. It was freezing cold but the hot chocolate and the moving images of the animation kept us warm.

I learned a lot putting this together, both conceptually and logistically.

60.30.1 Light Installation opens Dec. 8, 5pm

2008-11-22T21:41:00.012-05:00

I have been busily working the past month or two on an 11-site installation over three campuses of Harvard University. 60.30.1 commemorates the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The 30 articles of the Declaration will be projected onto buildings in Harvard Yard, Harvard Law School, and Harvard's Kennedy School from 5-10pm on December 8-10. On the side of Widener Library there will be a short animation co-directed and animated by Norah Solorzano that depicts the entire document.

We've used a stenciled spray paint look to simulate graffiti on the buildings - representing how it has become subversive to talk about basic rights which should be guaranteed to everyone.

I am the project's artistic director, and it is produced by the University Committee on Human Rights Studies, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, and the Film Study Center (of which I am Interim Assistant Director). Special thanks to Steven Brzozowski from the Carr Center, Lauren Herman from UCHRS, and Greg Morrow from Media Services for all their hard work.

Please come to the official launch of the installation at 5pm on Monday, December 8 outside Widener Library (Harvard Yard, Cambridge). Prof. Jacqueline Bhabha (Director, UCHRS) will kick off a week of events and activities around the Declaration's 60th Anniversary. Refreshments will be served.

Click here for more information about Harvard's activities around the anniversary.

25th & Mission to Play at Boston Asian American Film Festival October 24

2008-10-19T21:20:00.009-04:00

My short film “25^th & Mission” (7 min, 2007) is playing at the Boston Asian American Film Festival on Friday, October 24 at 8:00pm at Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center, located in Josiah Quincy School, 90 Tyler Street in Boston’s Chinatown. It will be part of a program called “Good Things Come in Small Packages" (Click here for tickets). Here’s a description of the piece:

IN PARAGUAY at Venice Film Festival

2008-08-05T21:32:00.000-04:00

The Venice Biennale has just announced its lineup for the 65th Venice International Film Festival, to be held August 27 - September 6, 208. Included is Ross McElwee's new film, "In Paraguay," which I co-edited.

DUALITIES Show at Swell Gallery, San Francisco

2008-07-30T00:47:00.000-04:00

My first-ever video installation is up in the "Dualities" show at Swell Gallery on the graduate campus of San Francisco Art Institute, 2565 Third Street, San Francisco. The opening reception is Saturday, August 2, 3-5pm. My piece is a pilot installation for a larger work based on my "Lalita" film - beginning to explore the different types of documentation in Lalita's life (including medical scans). I travelled with my subject to India a few weeks ago to visit her 89-year-old mother, which was quite an experience. I'm seeing a pattern in my films, that every serious work I've made involves some kind of return to a homeland.

Public Humanist Blog

2008-05-14T08:49:00.004-04:00

I've just added a post to the Public Humanist Blog put out by Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities. Check it out!

Keepers of Tradition exhibit

2008-04-08T10:12:00.004-04:00

The National Heritage Museum in Lexington, MA, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council open a major exhibition called "Keepers of Tradition: Art and Folk Heritage in Massachusetts" on May 18, 2008. The exhibition will feature over 100 works by 70 Massachusetts artists who preserve and revitalize deeply rooted traditions. We'll see everything from Native American basketry to Yankee wooden boats, Armenian lace, Chinese seals, Puerto Rican santos, and Irish music and dance.

A clip from my documentary "Monkey Dance" will be shown in a kiosk accompanying costumes from Lowell's Angkor Dance Troupe.

Snow Removal in Montreal

2008-03-05T09:20:00.004-05:00

I was in Montréal the last few days shooting a new video project and had the opportunity to observe the snow removal strategies there. It's like a military operation, with a $120 million annual budget and 27 sites around the city where they dump mountains of dirty snow to get them off the road.

I left just in time to miss a storm expected to drop 15-20cm of snow, followed by a dose of "ice pellets" overnight. Whew.

Changes at IFP

2008-02-21T10:02:00.007-05:00

At Filmmakers Workshop last night we were visited by Milton Tabbot, Senior Director of Programming at IFP (Independent Feature Project). We were first to hear about some exciting changes in the IFP Market as it approaches its 30th year. These changes will be officially announced in March, when applications for this September's Market go online. Some of them include:

only 60-75 documentary films will be accepted (with a roughly equal number of narrative works), continuing IFP's push to be more helpful to filmmakers and industry professionals and less of a "circus"
documentaries will only be accepted as works-in-progress, and narrative films only at the script stage

We really appreciate Milton making a special trip to Boston to meet with our thriving filmmaker community - thank you, Milton, and keep up the great work!

Beethoven DVD Completed

2008-02-18T13:58:00.001-05:00

Pianist Mia Chung and I have just completed an exciting DVD project called Notations: A Composer's Response to Crisis. Designed for piano students and classical music enthusiasts, the DVD explores the creative process behind two of Beethoven's best-loved piano sonatas (Opus 53 and Opus 110). It includes wonderful straight-through performances, pianists' commentary, background lectures, and technical demonstrations.

The project took a year and a half to put together, and involved a team of about 15 people including sound engineer Joel Gordon (who has his own interesting project called Art of the States) and DP Thomas Danielczik. Check back soon for information about purchasing the DVD.

FILMING CULTURE Screening Fri. Feb. 1

2008-01-17T20:22:00.001-05:00

Short pieces from my FILMING CULTURE class at Mass. College of Art (through their great Continuing Education program) will screen on Friday, Feb. 1 at 7pm. The screening will take place in the screening room called Film 1 in the North Building at Mass Art (621 Huntington Avenue, Boston). The class looked at the capabilities of video to document, convey, and critique culture. Light refreshments will be served. All are welcome!

A New Model for Online Media Distribution

2007-11-15T16:41:00.000-05:00

Last night at Filmmakers Workshop (the salon I co-organize for Boston’s independent mediamakers), two visitors spoke about online distribution for independent film work. It was fascinating to hear from Brian Newman, Executive Director of Renew Media in New York, about their very ambitious REFRAME project to digitize and make accessible vast quantities of media arts from independent filmmakers, artists, distributors, archives and other sources of independent and alternative media.

REFRAME is funded largely by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and has the refreshing non-commercial goal of furthering “the dissemination of important media arts and the preservation and accessibility of our visual heritage.” Contracts with artists, archives, distributors, and other partners will be non-exclusive, include free or low-cost digitization, and allow media partners to set their own purchase and rental prices. According to Newman this will all be delivered via a polished website with robust searching and browsing features. Launch is scheduled for the coming months, and it will be very exciting to see what happens! You can read more at their website or on David Tamés’s Kino-Eye blog.

Joe Zina, Executive Director of the Coolidge Corner Theater, also spoke about the Coolidge Internet Theater – an exciting new section of their website where conversations begun in the theater can continue, students and young filmmakers can gain exposure, and independent mediamakers can fundraise or get the word out about their work. It’s an interesting way to use the power of the Internet to build local community. Congratulations, Coolidge!

A Student Again

2007-11-10T16:29:00.000-05:00

My family and I spent the summer in the San Francisco Bay Area as I began a low-residency MFA program at the San Francisco Art Institute. What fun to be a student again! After twelve years of teaching – pouring energy into bringing out my students’ vision as filmmakers – I now have advisors and teachers who help me develop as an artist.

Art school feels a lot different from my usual environment at a liberal arts college and among the documentary filmmaker/ public television crowd. As I sit among my classmates – painters, sculptors, photographers, and printmakers – I can’t help but look at video in a new way. I’m seeing the colors applied on the frame the way paint adheres to its surface. It’s freeing to try out new shooting and editing styles without worrying about narrative, context, exposition – or fundraising, rights clearances, and distribution.

My first project was a study of four tiny shops in a block of San Francisco’s multicultural Mission District. It started out as a little exercise and I got gradually drawn into the way surfaces are cleaned, colored, and transformed in these four locales. I think I will continue to explore some of these shooting and editing techniques in upcoming projects. I hope to find a way to bring a more formally interesting approach to work that has social content I care about.

Take a look at the video (7 minutes, MPEG) if you're interested:

Welcome!

2007-11-02T13:32:00.001-04:00

I’m finally joining the 21st century and starting a blog. Please check back for postings on my film and video work, life as an independent filmmaker and teacher, and things I’m learning from work in Boston’s mediamaking, academic, and social service communities.