"Fiore, In Love With Clay" Premiere screening

The U.S. Premiere of feature documentary "Fiore, In Love With Clay"

Director Richard Whymark will be in attendance to answer questions about the life and works of the fascinating Fiore De Henriquez.

FILM SYNOPSIS:

Internationally-renowned artist Fiore De Henriquez sculpted HRH the Queen Mother, Igor Stravinsky, Oprah Winfrey, Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida and President Kennedy among many others.

"Fiore: In Love with Clay" examines her life and her art through the eyes of those closest to her.

Having endured an abusive elder brother, Fiore discovered at puberty that she was intersex and joined the WW2 Italian partisans (disguised as a man) to rescue Jews from the Nazis. She was captured but escaped across the Alps.

Moving to post-war England, she found herself amongst Princess Margaret's set and her sitters soon included HRH the Queen Mother, Peter Ustinov, Margot Fonteyn and Augustus John, as well as international figures such as President Kennedy, Oprah Winfrey and Prime Minister Yoshida.

But there was more to Fiore than sculpture. While battling with - and eventually accepting - her intersexuality, duality became prominent in her art, her life and her explosive love affairs; while moving among high society across Europe and the United States, she would often try to seduce the wives of various couples, with mixed success.

Her private art reflected her internal struggles as she was going through experimental sex change medicine; first using hormones to reduce her breasts and be a man. However, these sent her into deep depressions and she instead chose to have radiation to remove her penis. Her art from this time represents her feelings of being cut into two parts.

In the late 1960s, she purchased a Tuscan village and transformed it into an arts centre and her refuge - Peralta.