Hungary – Two events at the Italian Cultural Institute to celebrate the ingeniousness of Lorenza Mazzetti

The writer, film director and artist Lorenza Mazzetti, who was born in 1927, lives between Rome and Bolsena, where she still paints and writes. The Italian Cultural Institute in Budapest will devote two events to Ms Mazzetti: on 27 September the film  “Il cielo cade” [The Sky Falls], drawn from Mazzetti’s autobiographical novel and featuring Isabella Rossellini, will be screened at 6 p.m.; and on 28 September the Institute will offer the documentary film  “Perché sono un genio” [Because I ‘m a genius] by Steve Della Casa and Francesco Frisari, with the participation of film director Edoardo Salerno, also at 6 p.m. Lorenza Mazzetti was raised in Tuscany in a large family estate owned by her aunt, Nina Mazzella, who was married to Robert Einstein, Albert’s cousin. She spent joyful years in Tuscany, along with the daughters of her aunt, until tragedy struck in August 1944. Lorenza witnessed the atrocious massacre of the Einstein family, killed by SS squads, an incident which forever left a mark in her life. After high school, she moved to London where she was admitted to the Slade School of Fine Art. That was when Lorenza Mazzetta produced her first feature length film, “K”. She was included among the founders of the Free Cinema Movement, along with  Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson and  Karel Reisz, making up the ‘Angry Generation’, a group that was to revolutionise English cinema by refuting the upper class. Immediately after she produced “Together”, which was awarded the “Mension au film del recherch” at the Cannes Cinema Festival in 1956.