Lorenza Mazzetta's "genius" resides in her fantastic and profound outlook which she experiences and uses to tell her extraordinary story and to create the many works that derive from this. Adopted as a little girl by the Einstein family, which was to be exterminated by the SS before her eyes, in the early 1950s she went to London in order to forget. She managed to enter the well-known Slade School of Fine Art, having asked to be accepted "Because I'm a genius!" - she didn't know what else to say. She steals a movie camera, becomes a director, and shoots K, a film about the person she feels closest to: Kafka. She establishes Free Cinema and revolutionizes British film together with Lindsay Anderson, Kael Reisz, and Tony Richardson. For Together, her second film, one about two deaf and dumb laborers in a London being bombed by the Germans, she wins an award at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival. Having returned to Italy, she finds Paola, her twin sister. She remembers a tragedy that she had repressed, and so writes Il cielo cade, the funny yet tragic diary of a little girl who talks about fascism, the war, and what happened to her. In the film we meet this woman, who still exhibits all the freedom of childhood, through her memories, animations of her paintings, life today, her friends, and the witnesses to her story: Bernardo Bertolucci, Malcolm McDowell, and David Grieco.

Perché sono un genio! Lorenza Mazzetti

Brighid Lowe’s new, intimate documentary, made with Henry K. Miller, builds around candid interviews with Mazzetti herself, to provide new insights about the Italian’s life of love and trauma and the unparalleled efforts she expended to make films in 1950s London.