Fioretta: Bridging Past and Present Amidst Israel’s Turmoil with Mishory, Schoenberg

And it sends many genealogists off exploring cemeteries. One cemetery happens to be in Vienna, Austria, where Schoenberg’s most famous ancestor, his grandfather, Arnold Schoenberg, the renowned 20th-century composer, is buried. Another cemetery contained a number of hope-for ancestors, but it was not accessible for the film. Mishory figures the team canvassed more than a dozen cemeteries in all.

“It’s the puzzle, the game, and the search,” says Schoenberg. “For Matthew, it is the memory and what is passed on adding a nice element to my quest.”

Schoenberg embodies a dogged, determined Jewish ethos that is the reason for resurrecting lives that could have otherwise been forgotten. He takes perseverance in this hunt for his relatives and learns of their past and who they were as far as possible. While in pursuit, Mishory films the buildings and places Schoenberg visits and ferrets out as part of the story, a recollection of the past, which is quite impressive.

Joey and Randy Schoenberg in Vienna City Archives pool of light

“It’s the puzzle, the game, and the search…”

“If I had not been a filmmaker, I might have been an architect,” says Mishory. “And in Fioretta, the physical spaces operated as a visual metaphor because we didn’t have the faces of the people from past eras whose lives Randy had so carefully reconstructed. But we did still have some of the places they inhabited.” Schoenberg’s cousin, Venetian painter Serena Nono, filled in the gaps with paintings of those ancestors as she imagined them. They provide a riveting illumination and visualization of who those people were.

Schoenberg’s passion for family history is an obsessive, detail-oriented pursuit, which Mishory wanted to capture. “We needed to feel and see this,” says Mishory. “Dredging up lives that have been lost to the ash heap of history and bringing them back in some way—that is Randy’s work. And it’s painstaking, obsessive work. I wanted the film to have an element of process.”

Fioretta is told with Schoenberg’s son Joey, and as a 500-year family history unfolds, it is not only a Jewish history but also a history of Europe. Including Joey in Fioretta–which was not in the original production plan–significantly impacts the film because as Randy looks backward, Joey brings the story forward to a new generation in the quest and lends another hand in the investigative journey.