Eli Lotar

Eli Lotar was a French and Romanian photographer, cinematographer and film director. The eldest son of writer Tudor Arghezi, his mother was the schoolteacher and poet Constanța Zissu, who got pregnant with Arghezi when the latter was a monk in the Romanian Orthodox Church; Arghezi recognized him, and, upon being defrocked, married Zissu. Lotar was cared for by his father and stepmother in Bucharest, becoming a resentful and rebellious child. He was reunited with Constanța after the World War I division of Romania, when she took him to Iași. He then attended Saint Sava National College, but often ran away to rejoin Zissu. Upon her death, he still rejected Arghezi's tutelage, and, before the end of 1924, fled to Paris.