A PAN film review by Steve Bergson: Fiume o Morte!
Fiume o morte! (Fiume or Death!): definitely not a foreign country
Unless we engage the past as a living present it will insist in ways that are not only a warning for the future but threaten the very possibility of equitable co-existence.
The judgement of the Rotterdam International Film Festival in awarding the film the 2025 Tiger Award
This is an unusual film with an unusual story. Made by Croatian director Igor Bezinovic it sets out to entertain the viewer with an approach which manages to be original and genuinely eye opening – both in the continued relevance of the historical events but also the ways in which we view them. If that sounds like a tiresome meta critique of the documentary form, the film makes you think again; it’s wildly entertaining and totally absorbing.
So the core story seems simple; it concerns the bizarre events surrounding the 16-month occupation of the Croatian city of Rijeka, which in the chaos at the end of the First World War, was taken and occupied by the Italian poet, dandy and proponent of war, Gabriele D’Annunzio who led a large mass of armed Italian soldiers into town and established his own proto-fascist state in the city they called Fiume, hence the title.
Right away you know this is not a conventional unfolding of a little known story when the film opens on archive pictures of locations against the current settings and interviews with locals at Rijeka’s main market. Bezinovic asks if they know who Gabriele D’Annunzio was. The film then moves beyond the limited knowledge they express into re-enactments with the exact same people. This immediately strikes a surprising note but the narration changes hands among local people as well; even the role of the egotistical Italian leader is handled alternately by them. And there’s no attempt to make them carry much real historical verisimilitude beyond a passing resemblance. At one point, the different incarnations of the tinpot dictator even form a rock band in the middle of a scene..
This blending of documentary and drama, skilfully edited by Hrvoslava Brkusic keeps the audience guessing. Given the date of the events being portrayed, there’s naturally much more still image record than film available, over 10,000 photographs in fact, taken just during the occupation. All the original archive material is actually more bizarre and tellingly grotesque than any of the reconstruction, however wittily the two elements are contrasted. The re-enactment is very playful and often quite funny but the archive is handled as flawed record, with film clips stopping noisily as if being played in a projector in realtime and being flagged as absent from certain key moments for reasons that are clear in the context of the story. The aspect ratio of different elements are deployed as stylistic devices rather than hidden in the 1.78 :1 format of the enclosing film but they also highlight the limitations of archive in capturing history – in a very entertaining way.
You are never not aware that this is a film interpretation of a controversial episode. The narration is in the Fiume dialect of Italian spoken by Fiumani residents of the city but you are never allowed to forget the real protagonist is the Croatian version of the place – Rijeka itself – through its residents, its history, its character. The director, himself a native of the city, constantly maintains involvement with the locals who become part of the film. The tone shifts – even getting quite graphic in its depiction of the battle at the end when the mainstream Italian forces set about retaking this outlier from rising Fascist power. The film never fully explores the opposition there undoubtedly was to this arbitrary authoritarian rule – and its violent demise seems equally surreal. The coup de grace is when we hear from the man himself now in exile back in Italy,in a clip with audio. The whole episode appears to be as bound up in the progress of recording technology as interwar politics. Even a subtler layering of such a self-contained story would do nothing to take away from the sense of a community reclaiming its past while at the same time shining a light on contemporary world politics.
So…a rare combination of elements given a new spin. By playing with the formal conventions of recording history, the film grapples with the past not as a museum piece of history but more a living reality that impacts the present for all of us. This is a refreshing attitude to what might appear superficially to be as distant a subject as the memory the residents of Rijeka initially have about the figure of D’Annunzio. He’s pompous, whimsical, ridiculous….and dangerous. The parallels are unmistakable. This example just happens to occur in a Croatian city.
• Fiume o morte! was touring UK independent cinemas including the ICA, Garden Cinema and Barbican in London and the Watershed in Bristol, and the Ultimate Picture Palace in Oxford. Now it’s with Prime Video and MUBI though with limited streaming in the UK.