\nThe protagonists of this film are E. Randol (Randy) Schoenberg, a Los Angeles attorney who has helped recover many Nazi-looted artworks, and his teenaged son Joey, who aspires to be a chef.<\/p>\n
Randy, the grandson of composer Arnold Schoenberg, is a passionate amateur genealogist whose mission in life also involves recovering his own family\u2019s memories looted by time and circumstance, nearly obliterated by ghetto, pogrom, and Holocaust. Randy\u2019s assiduous work has yielded much detail about ancestors stretching back half a millennium to a woman named Fioretta, who lived in the Venice ghetto in the sixteenth century.<\/p>\n
In lesser hands, a film about genealogical and archival research could be boring and tedious, but in Marc Mishory\u2019s capable hands, the narrative is lively and engaging, involving treks to quaint cemeteries and chats with eccentric librarians and graveyard curators. Fioretta<\/i><\/b> <\/i>is further enlivened by convivial encounters with newly found cousins who are thrilled to join Randy\u2019s relentless quest for long-buried roots.<\/p>\n
According to the film’s publicists, Fioretta<\/i> <\/b>is an \u201centhralling and personal documentary\u201d that is \u201ca story of kings and mystics, but also of everyday people who lived through centuries of historical upheaval throughout Europe, taking Randy and Joey\u2014and the viewer\u2014on a journey from California to Austria, the Czech Republic, and Italy.\u201d\u00a0 Throughout, Mishory adroitly uses a mobile camera, not a fixed one, to underscore the fluid nature of their meanderings, as opposed to the style of documentarians such as Ken Burns, who favors a more static visual approach.<\/p>\n
![\"Fioretta](\"https:\/\/cinemadailyus.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/Fioretta-1.png\")
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\u00a9\u00a02023 Rubber Ring Films LLC<\/p>\n
Their journey also includes a moving visit to Theresienstadt, the Nazi concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic that served as a home for thousands of exiled Jews, many of them elderly and cultured. Fioretta<\/b> is thus a deeply textured film that weaves tragedy and triumph, doom and delight, catastrophe and charm into a seamless whole.
\nMany of the most touching scenes in this film were shot in Vienna and Prague, giving the viewer a glimpse into the rich, Jewish-inflected culture that once flourished in the old Habsburg lands before the Nazis brutally eradicated everything.<\/p>\n
From Kafka<\/span><\/a>\u2019s grave to a streetside monument constructed of keys near Freud<\/span><\/a>\u2019s home, Fioretta<\/b> unlocks all that is noble and enduring in a vanished world. Time and time again, the cast of this impressive film are shown ritually placing stones on the gravestones of the dead, fulfilling the duty of the living to insure their forebears never \u201cendure the final death of being forgotten,\u201d in the words of a rabbi in the documentary. (On Hyam Plutzik\u2019s gravestone, it should be noted, are inscribed these words from another of his poems: \u201cNothing can be done, but something can be said at least.\u201d)<\/p>\n While Fioretta<\/i><\/b> <\/i>is certainly important as a witness to the past, it also serves as a cautionary tale for our present era which is witnessing a dangerous revival of anti-Semitism in America, once revered as an unshakeable bulwark against the fanaticism that is so pointedly documented here.<\/p>\n Rating: A+<\/p>\n