Together With Lorenza Mazzetti review – compelling final testament from overlooked director

The Italian director, whose film Together made a key contribution to the Free Cinema movement in the UK, died in 2020 but this interview is a fitting tribute

Lorenza Mazzetti was the Italian artist, writer and film-maker whose short film Together made a key contribution to the influential mid-1950s Free Cinema movement in the UK; she died in 2020 having returned to Italy and spent her subsequent career writing novels and memoirs, and running a puppet theatre in Rome. While her film output was undeniably slim, she was one of the vanishingly few female directors operating in Britain in the 1950s, and has become something of a focus and symbolic figure for academics and film-makers hoping to unearth hidden histories.

This undoubtedly has been the case for Brighid Lowe, associate professor at the Slade School of Fine Art, the institution into which Mazzetti barrelled as a neophyte artist in 1951, and where, Oscar-Wildeishly, she announced her “genius” to the institution’s director, painter William Coldstream. The meat of Lowe’s film, a self-described labour of love at least five years in the making, is interview material with a 90-year-old Mazzetti by fellow academic and critic Henry K Miller, in which Mazzetti (with a bit of prompting) reminisces about her time in London, and the roots of her art, in what now looks like a final testament.