Fiume o morte!  

Fiume o morte!  

Igor Bezinović, Croatia, Italy, Slovenia, 2025, 112’

A playful reconstruction of the years 1919-1920, when the notorious literary and political show-off Gabriele D’Annunzio occupied the nearby town of Rijeka.  

Selected by young programmers in collaboration with the University of Primorska Faculty of Humanities. Before the screening, they talk to the film director. 

In 1919, outraged by the outcome of the Paris Peace Conference, which proposed handing the city of Fiume (now Rijeka) to Croatia, Italian poet, aristocrat, and army officer Gabriele D’Annunzio declared the Italian Regency of Carnaro. The ensuing 16-month occupation stands as one of history’s most peculiar experiments in governance. Igor Bezinović revisits this singular episode just over a century later, employing the help of his fellow Rijeka’s citizens in a bid to reclaim history and tell their version of what happened. 

Fiume o morte! is a film on poetry, dynamite, cocaine, machine guns, football, airplanes, furniture flying out of windows, concerts, prisons, sunbathing, thousands of soldiers, millions of bullets, endless speeches, a platypus and on the power of political performativity. D’Annunzio might as well be considered its trailblazer heralding some of the biggest masters of ghastly political showmanship of our age. 

Igor Bezinović from Rijeka, Croatia, studied philosophy, sociology and literature at the University of Zagreb, after which he trained as a filmmaker at the Zagreb Academy of the Dramatic Art. His first full-length documentary, The Blockade (2012), received the Oktavijan prize for best Croatian documentary and his hybrid feature A Brief Excursion (2017), which premiered in Rotterdam, received the Big Golden Arena prize for best Croatian feature. His original and engaged work has been celebrated internationally at numerous venues and events. 

The young programmers – Dora Plantarič, Naša Nedeljković, Andrea Gorenc Lonzarič, Tina Bazjako, and Marcela Grošelj – discussed their choice of film in a short presentation: 

Igor Bezinović’s Fiume o morte! offers an original narrative that goes beyond the classic documentary cinema. Featuring a mix of documentary and fiction elements, with an ironic distance, the film looks back in time at the 16-month occupation of Rijeka headed by the Italian poet and nationalist Gabriele D’Annunzio. Bezinović actively engages local residents in the film, who, as actors and narrators, contribute to the authenticity and dynamics of the narrative, blurring the line between historical memory and the present moment. 

Using archival footage, contemporary interviews and stylised reconstructions, the film creates a nuanced visual experience reminiscent, at times, of the meticulous compositions typical of the signature aesthetics of the likes of Wes Anderson. This is a film that reminds us that nationalist ideas never really go away; they merely change face. With aesthetic precision and ironic detachment, throwing in a good measure of black humour, it exposes the mechanisms of political manipulation and propaganda, the allure of militarism, and the desire for big stories. It is precisely these emphases that make the film work so well today – at a time when we are once again witnessing the rise of extremist ideologies and reinterpretations of history. 

We chose the film for the Kino Otok festival lineup because it is set just across the border and talks about something we all know: that history is found not just in books, but on the walls of the cities we live in, in the languages we speak, and in the ideas that still circulate among us. Fiume o morte! is both urgent and absurd, but also clever, elegant and, in its own way, gently brutal. It is not just a historical narrative, but a mirror for our times. As the world is once again confronted with radicalisms, it is a reminder of how quickly the aesthetics of revolution shift into dictatorship. 

Poster of Young Selectors. Author: Maša Nedeljković