ANDRÁS SCHIFF · INDIRECT NOSTALGIA
Feature Documentary · In preparation
I first met András Schiff in Budapest in 1968. He was fourteen. Twenty-five years later, I filmed my first extensive interview with him at my home in Cologne, which has never been published. Now, more than three decades later, we continue the interviews on camera.
Indirect Nostalgia looks beyond his career as a pianist to his roots — his family history and the cultural and historical world that shaped him. Drawing on these interviews and a wide range of archival material, the story reaches back to nineteenth-century Austria-Hungary, a period of Jewish emancipation, assimilation, and social, cultural and economic flourishing. It follows his family through two world wars, rising antisemitism, persecution and the Holocaust, to post-war Hungary and the decades of socialism, when Schiff’s own story begins, and through his international career to his place among the world’s leading pianists.
