“I hate memory,” says Benedetta Barzini near the end of “The Disappearance of My Mother.” In spite of this aversion to nostalgia, the film’s director, Beniamino Barrese, who happens to be Barzini’s son, smuggles in some material from her past. The first Italian model to appear on the cover of American Vogue, Barzini, now 76, was photographed by the likes of Irving Penn and Richard Avedon.

In New York in the 1960s, she hobnobbed with Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol. Back in Italy in subsequent decades, working as a journalist and an educator, she became a leading feminist voice, a rigorous critic of the ways the media and fashion industries manipulate and commodify women’s bodies and experiences.