It’s Sunday, March 6 and I’ve just asked director Julie M. Mallozzi ’92 a question that, if answered poorly, could devastate her integrity as a documentary filmmaker. Little do I know that her response will, in fact, blow my mind.

Monkey Dance is the second major documentary by Mallozzi, a current TF for Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) 150ar, “Film Production: Intermediate Studio Course.” Following three teenage Cambodian-American dancers from Lowell, Massachusetts over the course of three years in their lives, the film documents a wealth of situations that are rife with tense emotion—car crashes, prison sentences, and college financial aid issues.

Mallozzi’s work is so gripping and unrelentingly committed to understanding the kids’ life-altering problems that, while watching, I couldn’t help but wonder how she had wrangled with that sacred cow of documentary filmmaking: objectivity. So, in the post-viewing Q&A session, I’ve just asked her how she managed to maintain objectivity during such painful periods in her subjects’ lives, and whether or not she intervened at all. Immediately after I’ve spoken, I realize that my question could present her with a dangerous challenge.

Without missing a beat, the modest, soft-spoken Mallozzi openly admits to making an attempt to influence at least one major part of the film. Near the film’s end, one of the teens, Samnang, is accepted to his top-choice school, Brown University. However, due to a mix-up with his financial aid forms, he is unable to afford tuition, and has to decline the acceptance. At the Q&A, Mallozzi has no qualms about telling the audience members that she tried to raise money for the boy’s tuition.

“Objectivity is important,” she laughs. “But it’s more important to be a human being!”

Every aspiring filmmaker, journalist, or artist at Harvard can learn a lot from this incident: Mallozzi doesn’t get her inspiration from greedy dreams for multibillion-dollar box-office success or from pretentious notions of artistic purity. Both Mallozzi and her work are grounded in a relentless commitment to difficult truths and simple human dignity.

That’s not to say that Mallozzi is a simple person. From the very beginning of her life, she’s had to grapple with the frustration of an unclear cultural identity. Mallozzi grew up in rural Ohio as the child of a Chinese-born mother and an Italian-American father. “There were no minorities [where I grew up],” she recounts. “So we were considered very exotic, even though I was half-Chinese, and my mom didn’t even speak Chinese to us.”

Her arrival at Harvard in 1988 was no relief—Harvard’s Half-Asian Peoples Alliance did not yet exist, and as she recalls, “there were all these real Chinese people, and I really didn’t feel Chinese at all.”

On top of her ethno-cultural uncertainty, Mallozzi also found herself perplexed by her prospects as an undergraduate artist at Harvard. She initially had no intention of being a VES concentrator at Harvard.

“I started studying English,” she recalls, but during sophomore year, she realized that “studying English at Harvard was more like preparation for graduate school to become a professor…it wasn’t about writing original stuff of your own.”

Then, in 1988, she attended a campus screening of Mira Nair ’79’s 1988 film Salaam, Bombay. As Mallozzi watched a Harvard graduate receive the honor of introducing her own film on campus, she recalls thinking “‘Wow, that’s really cool! You can make films at Harvard!’” Mallozzi ended up joint-concentrating in English and VES, and now, close to 17 years later, film dominates her life.

Mallozzi’s tumultuous struggle to resolve ethno-cultural identity was less easily resolved, but she used her personal quest for self-understanding as the fuel for her first major documentary, 1999’s critically-acclaimed Once Removed. The film followed Mallozzi as she made her first journey to Communist China in order to learn about her family’s experiences during the Cultural Revolution.

The film had a successful run through the film festival circuit, and garnered first prize at the National Council on Family Relations Media Competition. The Boston Phoenix described it as “ingratiatingly unpretentious,” and that turn of phrase could really be used to describe the essence of Mallozzi’s personality and approach to filmmaking.

A prime example of this lack of pretension is Monkey Dance itself. The film is not in wide release (check out Mallozzi’s website at www.juliemallozzi.com for future screenings), but anyone who has the opportunity should jump at the chance to see it.

The un-narrated movie reels the audience into its tale of young adults raised both in turn-of-the-millennium suburbia and in the shadow of their parents’ memories of genocide, primarily by letting its subjects tell their own story. A significant portion of the film is shot by the kids themselves with hand-held cameras. When Mallozzi is behind the camera, her three-year effort reflects a painstaking and nonjudgmental commitment to capture minute details and make sure we don’t turn the characters into immigrant saints or ethnic stereotypes.