The Lorenza Mazzetti Collection Blu-Ray

The Lorenza Mazzetti Collection (Blu-ray)

Directors: Lorenza Mazzetti, Brighid Lowe

Lorenza Mazzetti came to London from Italy in 1951 after surviving a war event in which her Jewish relatives were murdered. She quickly became friends with other artists in a new and different world. Although she is associated with the realistic Free Cinema movement, her raw but playful films—all shot on location in the capital's bomb-ravaged, smog-filled vistas—are psychodramas, influenced by Kafka's bleak absurdity, the horrors she had endured, and the anxiety she felt at missing her twin sister back home.

This new edition contains Mazzetti's three deeply poetic, avant-garde and narrative London works, all recently remastered by the BFI National Archive, as well as a brand new feature-length documentary.

The films

K (1953, 29 min): the angular, fragmented K, based on Kafka's The Metamorphosis, made with equipment "borrowed" from the Slade School of Art, captures feelings of genuine animal terror. The Country Doctor (1953, 11 min): The Country Doctor, which was considered a lost film and was discovered in Wisconsin in 2019, is based on the writings of Franz Kafka and stars painter Victor Willing. (1956, 51 min): focuses on two deaf-mute and alienated dockworkers in the bomb-ravaged East End of London, starring artists Eduardo Paolozzi and Michael Andrews. Together with Lorenza Mazzetti (2023, 55 min): Brighid Lowe's new, intimate documentary, made in collaboration with Henry K Miller, is based on candid interviews with Mazzetti herself to provide new insights into the Italian's life of love and trauma and the extraordinary efforts she made to make films in 1950s London.p>

Extras

Audio commentaries: a series of discussions about the BFI National Archives' curatorial and restoration processes for these films, with BFI's William Fowler, Elena Nepoti, and Mike Kohler

Refuge England (1959, 26 min): With its uncompromising outsider's view of an unwelcoming 1950s London, the themes in Robert Vas' Refuge England are as relevant in today's society. The Landscape of Free Cinema (2022, 3 min): A short video essay presented by William Fowler, which looks at some of the themes in Together and how they relate to Lorenza Mazzetti's life. Limited edition (1,000 copies) with a 40-page booklet with texts by William Fowler, Henry K Miller, and Ali Smith, as well as notes on the restorations by Elena Nepoti. Reviews "She was amazing... she was the only woman in the group that formed the Free Cinema movement here in Britain in the 1950s, which revolutionized the British film industry, and although we may be more familiar with the names of other filmmakers in the group (Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, and Tony Richardson), we don't usually remember Mazzetti." --Ali Smith (Booker Prize-nominated author of How to Be Both)