PRESS RELEASE LORENZA MAZZETTI

Screening of Lorenza Mazzetti’s films ‘K’ (1953, 28’) and ‘Together’ (1956, 52’) followed by a conversation with Lorenza Mazzetti (in English)

Monday 5 May 2014, 17.00 - 19.30, Sainsbury Lecture Theatre

Orphaned of both parents at a very early age, Lorenza Mazzetti was raised, along with her twin sister Paola, by their paternal aunt Nina Mazzetti and uncle Robert Einstein (first cousin of Albert Einstein) and their two daughters. On 3 August 1944, the SS killed Lorenza’s aunt and cousins in the massacre of Rignano in Tuscany. Uncle Robert, devastated by the loss, took his life the following year.

In the early 1950s Lorenza moved to London and was accepted as a student at the Slade School of Fine Art, where she made her first short film ‘K’, from Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ (Gregor Samsa was played by fellow Slade student Michael Andrews). The British Film Institute Experimental Film Fund produced her second film ‘Together’, which tells the story of two deaf-mutes in the East End of London (played by Michael Andrews and Eduardo Paolozzi). The film, completed with the collaboration of , was premiered as part of the first Free Cinema programme at the National Film Theatre in London in February 1956. Mazzetti participated in the writing of the manifesto of Free Cinema with Anderson, and .

‘Together’ was awarded a prize at the Cannes Film Festival 1956. Lorenza Mazzetti went back to Italy where she wrote her first book, ‘Il cielo cade’ which won the prestigious Viareggio Literary Prize in 1962 (translated into English as ‘The sky falls’, Bodley Head, 1962).

In 2014 Mazzetti published ‘Diario londinese’ (Sellerio) which recounts the story of her life in London and the making of her films.

For further information, please contact Jacopo Benci

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