Fiume o morte!: wonderfully irreverent doc reenacts a brief dictatorship
With the help of local dustmen and war vets, director Igor Bezinović’s meta documentary restages a bizarre episode in Rijeka’s history, when it was placed under nationalist occupation by the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio.
- Reviewed from the 2025 International Film Festival Rotterdam
For a chaotic 15 months after World War I, the Italian decadent poet and army general Gabriele D’Annunzio was so high on strongarm swagger he was convinced he could establish his own state and occupied the seaport city of Fiume (now Croatia’s Rijeka). This bizarre episode, largely faded from local memory, is returned to public attention by documentarian Igor Bezinović in Fiume o morte! (2025), the deserving Tiger award-winner at the Rotterdam Film Festival. Bezinović enlists fellow citizens to re-enact episodes of the proto-fascist dictator’s brief rule of his hometown – a timely interrogation of history in today’s era of resurgent authoritarianism in Europe.
Bezinović, who previously documented Croatia’s 2009 student protests in The Blockade (2012), does not glorify but instead deconstructs and demystifies the inner workings of power. He positions collaborative public imagination as an empowering antidote to repressive terror and apathy, in a city strategically located on the Adriatic that has changed hands countless times.
Seven locals, from a municipal dustman to a war veteran, take turns as the bald-headed, immaculately attired and Italian-speaking D’Annunzio, in a freewheeling, meta format that places the constructed nature of authority very much in the frame. As ‘D’Annunzio’ makes his approach to Fiume in a red Fiat sports car leading a truck convoy, punk band Izet Medošević and Borgie launch into a track on the roadside, in one of many anarchic flourishes that seem to collapse time in a shattering of genre rules. As a historical re-enactment by way of droll subversiveness, the film is not dissimilar in spirit to Radu Jude’s I Do Not Care If We Go Down In History as Barbarians (2018) – another film about society’s hesitance address its worst tendencies in any official capacity.
D’Annunzio had a taste for visual theatrics, which not only prompted underlings to steal unconventional gifts for him (such as an eagle head from Fiume’s clock tower and a taxidermied platypus), but led him to set up a photography collection, which includes 10,000 photographs of his time as Fiume’s ‘Duce’. Surreal archival stills from this astonishing trove are incorporated, forming the backbone of a deft assemblage of materials. Bezinović also knows when less is more. Clever sound design is enough to invoke the mood on the ground as D’Annunzio’s leveraging power over Fiume runs out, and he is ousted in 1920’s ‘Bloody Christmas‘. With Fiume o morte!, Bezinović masterfully deploys playful irreverence to transform rigorous research into a living, shared resource for solidarity in action.