Strategically located cities can, by their very nature, find themselves fiercely contested across the centuries, with rulers and nationalities changing time and time again. The Croatian Rijeka is such a place…a strategic seaport contested between the Holy Roman Empire, Italy and Croatia over the years, but now settled as a busy and beautiful harbour town.
With Fiume o morte!, Rijeka-born filmmaker Igor Bezinović offers a quite wonderful delve into a very specific moment in the rich history of his home city, and uses this as an artistic jumping-off point to dwell on the cultural and political impact of how a city can change – both in name and tone – when invaders come to town.
In this instance he looks back to September 12, 1919, when a troop of some three hundred nationalist irregulars under the leadership of the flamboyant war-loving Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio headed into the Northern-Adriatic port town of Fiume, now Rijeka, with a plan to annex the city to Italy.
Bezinović’s film is a wonderfully freewheeling retelling of that event and subsequent 16-month occupation, but seen through the prism of light-hearted re-enactment together with astute use of archival footage and imagery, and a debate about the impact on the city. D’Annunzio’s official photography team captured over 10,000 images and these are used as clever and insightful prompts for Bezinović himself as he recruits some three hundred local citizens, and sets about orchestrating a visual history lesson focused on the siege and its modern-day implications.
His starting point is in chatting to locals and asking how many of them know about D’Annunzio; setting up a series of screen tests and making sure he has enough bald men of a certain age who can play D’Annunzio. There is also special attention to those who can speak Fiuman, the city’s unique dialect of the Venetian tongue, spoken by an estimated 20,000 local Italians, Croats and other minorities.
The film sets about re-creating D’Annunzio’s journey into the city (a convoy of modern-day trucks led by ‘D’Annunzio’ drive into the centre of the city, much to the bemusement of locals sitting in cafes) and re-enacting still images of the occupation. The filmic journey is delightfully surreal at times but also decidedly serious as it recounts the sheer madness of what D’Annunzio was up to, and the oddball life he was living.
The uniform-loving, drug-taking, fascist-poet lacked support from the Italian government, so he set about creating an independent state called the Italian Regency of Carnaro (which was the first state in the world to recognise Soviet Russia), that was part-intellectual/cultural experiment and part-dictatorship. But in November of the following year, when Italy and Yugoslavia signed a treaty that saw Fiume as an independent free state, D’Annunzio’s response was to declare war on Italy. A bombardment by Italian forces swiftly led to his surrender.
Fiume o morte! is a fascinating, entertaining and provocative journey into certainly one of the strangest aspects of the city’s history, offering various viewpoints and narratives that help balance the darker side of the story alongside the often ridiculous. Sunbathing soldiers, bombastic speeches and even a platypus feature in this oddball story of how a vain political showman had such a drastic impact on a city struggling to find itself post-World War I.
Croatia-Italy-Slovenia, 2025, 112mins
Director: Igor Bezinović
Production: Restart, Videomante, Nosorogi
International sales: Lightdox
Producers: Vanja Jambrovic, Tibor Keser, Erica Barbiani, Marina Gumzi
Cinematography: Gregor Božič
Editor: Hrvoslava Brkušić
Music: Giovanni Maier, Hrvoje Nikšić
With: Izet Medošević, Ćenan Beljulji, Albano Vučetić, Tihomir Buterin, Andrea Marsanich, Massimo Ronzani, Milovan Večerina Cico
