Ryan Reynolds, the A-list actor renowned for playing superheroes such as Deadpool, once declared that portraying Los Angeles attorney E. Randol “Randy” Schoenberg in the 2015 film, “Woman in Gold,” was like stepping into the shoes of a real-life superhero. The film recounts how the attorney and philanthropist – grandson of the pioneering 20th century classical music composer Arnold Schoenberg – successfully sued the Austrian government to return five Nazi-looted Gustav Klimt paintings to a Viennese refugee from the Holocaust in 2006. 

What is perhaps less known about Schoenberg is his lifelong burning obsession with genealogy and tracing his family tree back through the centuries. His preoccupation is the subject of Matthew Mishory’s new documentary, “Fioretta,” in which Randy, with his initially reluctant youngest child, Joey Schoenberg, 18, set off on a roots road trip from Vienna to Prague to Italy. Their goal is to track down the grave of their oldest known ancestor, Fioretta (nee Kalonymos) Chalfan, a woman who lived in the Jewish ghetto in Venice in the 16th century. 

While perusing letters and other documents in dusty archives and ornate tombstones in overgrown cemeteries, the Schoenbergs meet a diverse cast of characters who help them on their quest: long-lost relatives, scholars and historians, as well as a nonagenarian Holocaust survivor who tends to an obscure cemetery where Jews of the Venice ghetto buried their dead. Along the way, the Schoenbergs learn more about how their forebears’ lives intersected with 500 years of European and Jewish history, including persecution during the Inquisition and the Holocaust. 

Randy and Joey also visit the apartment house where Arnold Schoenberg was born in Vienna, recount how he fled Europe after the Nazis came to power and resettled in Los Angeles in 1934.

“Everyone in the family thinks I’m nuts,” Randy says in the film about his passion for family history. “[But] I at least know I’m crazy.” 

In a Zoom interview, Randy told JLiving that he caught the genealogy bug back when he was 8, when a school assignment required him to create his own family tree. Randy’s project stretched back several generations, while his classmates “came back with [the equivalent] of father, mother, sister, dog,” he said. “There was no one else doing that kind of work in my family,” he added. “I must have intuited from my grandmother, who liked telling family stories, that this also would become my job.”

Eventually, Randy joined the board of directors of JewishGen.org and became a volunteer curator for Geni.com, a worldwide genealogy website. In 2010, he helped build and design the permanent exhibition of what is now called the Holocaust Museum LA. 

Eleven years later, Randy told an Italian cousin, an artist and filmmaker, that he could trace her mother’s line back to the 1500s. She promptly suggested that the endeavor might make for a good film. 

Enter writer-director Matthew Mishory, an Israeli-American who had previously made a documentary, “Absent,” about his own family’s experience in Moldova during the Holocaust, as well as “Arthur Schnabel: No Place of Exile,” on the pianist and composer who had been a childhood friend of Arnold Schoenberg’s. When Randy mentioned to Mishory that he was going to Europe to obtain further information about his ancestors, the filmmaker asked him just how much family history he was planning to explore. “I was thinking, optimistically, that he might say back to 1850 or 1860,” Mishory said in an interview. “But he said all the way back to the formation of the Venice Jewish ghetto and that the family history he’d be exploring in fact traced a 500-year arc of European history. That is why my producer, Brad Schlei, who went to high school with Randy, and I turned to each other and thought this could be an interesting film.”

During a scouting trip with Randy to Europe in January 2022, Mishory met some of the people who would also appear in the movie. “My producer, Brad, called this the ‘Wes Anderson quotient,’” Mishory said. “It’s where we introduce people who hang around in cemeteries and wear corduroy jackets with elbow patches. It’s a colorful cast of characters, very likeable and unusual people who’ve really become sort of a backbone to this story and our guides as we descend into the rabbit hole of the past.”

Joey, who in an interview described his father’s preoccupation with genealogy as “crazy but cool,” at first thought the trip might bore him. “We’d taken trips before where Joey had complained bitterly about me dragging him to cemeteries and things like that,” Randy said. “He was not overly interested in all of this and that’s totally understandable.”