In defiance of the Paris Peace Conference Italian poet and military officer Gabriele D’Annunzio led a rogue, short-lived and ultranationalist occupation of Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia) in 1919. Over a century later, filmmaker Igor Bezinović revisits this strange historical episode, blending archive, reenactment and interviews with residents in the present, interrogating how a city remembers and forgets, and the enduring presence of European fascism.
A stark and peculiar lesson in the history that is not past, Fiume o morte! (Fiume or death!) won the Tiger Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2025 and is Croatia’s submission for the Oscars.
The Garden Cinema View:
Fiume O Morte is a lively, engaging, and occasionally amusing hybrid restaging of one of modern European history’s lesser known chapters. Bezinović enlists local people from Rijelka (ex-Fiume) - from dustmen to war vets - to reenact scenes from the short-lived kingdom, taking it in turn to play the self-appointed leader. He intersperses those scenes with a mix of archive footage and vox pops, altogether painting a colourful, slightly bonkers account of that time.
Surprisingly, it transpires that D’Annunzio wasn’t in fact wildly popular and had built his base thanks to a small, eclectic band of followers and bombastic charisma. Bezinović's aesthetic choices underline quite well the haphazard nature of fascist coups and allow the lesson from history to resonate in the present.
