Fiume o morte!, directed by Croatian Igor Bezinović, was named winner of the Documentary Award during the ceremony of the 38th European Film Awards (Berlin, January 17).
In 1919, the flamboyant, some say narcissistic, politician Gabriele D’Annunzio staged a coup in the Croatian port town of Rijeka, and thereafter ruled for 16 months. In his new film, Igor Bezinović tells the story of this tumultuous period via archive and recreations staged with local people, with a variety of amateur actors playing D’Annunzio. “To tackle D’Annunzio’s madness, you have to be as passionate about it [the story] as him,” Bezinović told BDE in November 2025.
Sales of the film are handled by Lightdox. Icarus is handling the US release of the film, while the ICA is aboard for the UK. After its world premiere at IFFR 2025, the film won both a Tiger Award and the FIPRESCI prize.
The five Documentary nominees were:
- Afternoons of Solitude Director: Albert Serra. Screenwriter: Albert Serra. Producer: Albert Serra, Montse Triola, Pedro Palacios, Luís Ferrón, Ricard Sales, Pierre-Olivier Bardet
- Fiume o morte! Director: Igor Bezinović. Screenwriter: Igor Bezinović. Producer: Vanja Jambrovic, Tibor Keser, Erica Barbiani, Marina Gumzi
- Riefenstahl Director: Andres Veiel. Screenwriter: Andres Veiel. Producers: Sandra Maischberger, Enzo Maaß
- Songs of Slow Burning Earth Director: Olha Zhurba. Screenwriter: Olha Zhurba. Producers: Darya Bassel, Anne Köhncke, Kerstin Übelacker
- With Hasan in Gaza Director: Kamal Aljafari. Screenwriter: Kamal Aljafari. Producers: Kamal Aljafari, Flavia Mazzarino
As reported in Business Doc Europe, the period portrayed in Fiume o morte! was exhaustively documented. A reported 10,000 photographs were taken of D’Annunzio and his followers. These images form the backbone of Bezinović’s film.
Some of the pictures seen in the film were taken by local photographers. However, the footage of D’Annunzio giving the Roman salute was filmed by British Pathé, and D’Annunzio had many other important international press representatives following him.
Bezinović uses the pictures as the starting point for his vivid and often very funny recreations of the Italian maverick’s eccentric invasion. “They were, without a doubt, one of the biggest motivations why I did the film this way. I decided to base everything on the images,” he tells BDE.
The director, who was himself born in Rijeka, has been poring over these images for years and has built up a strong emotional connection to them. He received the first script development money for his film back in 2015. In 2019, he visited the Vittoriale museum which houses many of D’Annunzio’s possessions.
“When I started looking through [the images], it was one of the most exciting days in my life,” he enthuses about the hoard he uncovered. He consulted historians to discover more about the pictures that most fascinated him. As we see in the documentary, he then worked out exactly where the pictures had been taken, and shot his own images in exactly those places.
The recreations are staged with local people and with a variety of amateur actors playing D’Annunzio.
“I wanted to share responsibility. I didn’t want to give the role of D’Annunzio to only one person. Since the whole film is a collective effort, we have seven narrators and me as an eighth narrator; we have a huge number of people who applied to be in the film; we were also doing the street casting you see in the film.”
How does the director feel about D’Annunzio now, having spent all those hundreds of hours researching and thinking about him?
“I think he’s an egomaniac! These types of personalities should be taken as dangerous in our societies. This type of orientation of the whole world around yourself, I think it’s something that should be criticised…I would say that he’s a dangerous guy, and his ability to seduce people is something quite worrying.”
The director adds that he still finds D’Annunzio a fascinating film character – “but in the same way the Joker from Batmanis a fascinating film character…. he has a lot of wit and charm and he’s extremely intelligent, but you know you can’t trust him.”
