E-Mail This Article to a Friend MONKEY DANCE

The Cambodian monkey dance celebrates a pan-Asian folk hero: trickster and adventurer, warrior and retainer to eternally feuding monarchs, whose mind is as agile as his body. The real subject of this documentary is three Cambodian teenagers — Samnang, Sochenda, and Linda — growing up between cultures in Lowell. They need plenty of monkey wiles and courage to negotiate between the blandishments of urban America and the expectations of their parents, who survived the Khmer Rouge atrocities of the 1970s and found a troubled refuge here. The teens dance together in the Angkor Dance Troupe, founded by Linda’s father to retrieve and preserve what remained after the cultural genocide in Cambodia. All three of them are drawn to their heritage, but they all resist it, too. Julie Mallozzi’s film is, in part, a fascinating narrative of fusion, assimilation, and renewal — the hard inevitabilities of multiculturalism. The teens learn the traditional dances; outside, they do gymnastics, break dance, and boogaloo. They struggle to realize their parents’ dreams, pay for funky gear, and stay out of trouble, while working out their own hyphenated identities. At the end of the film they’re all in college and still evolving. (64 minutes)