Italian film-maker and author who became a founding member of the
British Free Cinema movementThe Italian film-maker and author Lorenza Mazzetti, who has died aged 91, declared herself to be a genius on her first day at the Slade School of Fine Art in
London, and she made good on her promise. She unleashed a capacity to tell stories in film and literature that evoked a childhood trauma in
Italy that she found too painful to discuss in person. Living in
Britain after the second world war, she became a founding member of the British Free Cinema movement alongside Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson.
Her most acclaimed movie, made in 1956 with the support of the BFI’s Experimental Film Fund, was Together, a heartbreaking depiction of urban isolation. In this largely dialogue-free film, the painter Michael Andrews and the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi appear as two brothers, both deaf and without speech, working as dockers in the blitz-struck East End of London, who are snubbed and taunted by locals, with terrible consequences.