Rounding out Sunday, October 26, at the AFI FEST 2025 was an inventive hybrid documentary Fiume o Morte! From Croatian director Igor Bezinović. The film re-enacts scenes from Gabriele D’Annunzio’s siege and occupation of the Adriatic seaport of Fiume (now Croatia’s Rijeka) in the aftermath of World War I. With the help of local dustmen and war vets, director Igor Bezinović’s meta documentary restages a bizarre episode in Rijeka’s history, when it was placed under nationalist occupation by the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio.
For a chaotic 15 months after World War I, the Italian decadent poet and army general Gabriele D’Annunzio was so high on strongarm swagger he was convinced he could establish his own state and occupied the seaport city of Fiume (now Croatia’s Rijeka).
This bizarre episode, largely faded from local memory, is returned to public attention by documentarian Igor Bezinović in Fiume o morte!(2025), the deserving Tiger award-winner at the Rotterdam Film Festival. Bezinović enlists fellow citizens to re-enact episodes of the proto-fascist dictator’s brief rule of his hometown – a timely interrogation of history in today’s era of resurgent authoritarianism in Europe. Following its success at Rotterdam, Fiume o morte! has been showered with awards at various international film festivals and submitted as Croatia’s big for an Oscar for Best International Feature Film at the 2026 Academy Awards.
Utilizing the extensive photographic record from the time (the vain and image-obsessed D’Annunzio employed a photographic division to document everything), Bezinović and company create droll reenactments, with actors in period costume interacting with contemporary passersby and reading texts in the increasingly forgotten Fiuman dialect. But the joking light-heartedness of the auditions and early scenes gives way to surprising pathos when events turn bloody.
To many, D’Annunzio was a crackpot, but he was also a clear influence on Benito Mussolini’s nascent fascist movement, which would march on Rome in 1922. Bezinović’s innovative film is a powerful act of historic re-imagining and un-forgetting, reminding us of the need for a living history that speaks to the present.
Bezinović, who previously documented Croatia’s 2009 student protests in The Blockade (2012), does not glorify but instead deconstructs and demystifies the inner workings of power. He positions collaborative public imagination as an empowering antidote to repressive terror and apathy, in a city strategically located on the Adriatic that has changed hands countless times.
Seven locals, from a municipal dustman to a war veteran, take turns as the bald-headed, immaculately attired and Italian-speaking D’Annunzio, in a freewheeling, meta format that places the constructed nature of authority very much in the frame. As ‘D’Annunzio’ makes his approach to Fiume in a red Fiat sports car leading a truck convoy, punk band Izet Medošević and Borgie launch into a track on the roadside, in one of many anarchic flourishes that seem to collapse time in a shattering of genre rules.
Writer and director Igor Bezinović grew up in the city and revisits the local experiment that took place at a time of nascent fascism in his new movie via a mix of dramatic re-enactments and reconstructions with the help of Rijeka’s citizens, historical photos and footage, and documentary elements. As he explained at the Q&A after the screening, he chose to stick to a chronological timeline and build his story around archival photographs. He also decided to open the film with asking local people in Rijeka what they know about D’Annunzio or the events in 1919 – and the majority (like most of us as viewers) knew little or nothing.
The period in history that it dissects wasn’t particularly long but it was certainly colorful. “There’s this quote from [Italian poet and filmmaker] Pier Paolo Pasolini who said that it was ‘a narcissistic escapade.’ So, he says that it was like a clownery,” Bezinović explains: “D’Annunzio is a dictator, but you realize that he’s a weird dictator. He’s like Joker from Batman. He’s this kind of a villain who you know is super intelligent and he’s super funny and witty, but at the same time you’re really afraid of him.”
Because the Italian government did not want to annex Fiume and break international obligations, D’Annunzio and his faithful eventually established what they dubbed the Italian Regency of Carnaro. For Bezinović, this film is “like a history lesson but retold in a fun way.” ”For American audiences, I think parallels between Trump and D’Annunzio will be so obvious,” he argues. D’Annunzio also used what was known as “the Roman salute” as part of his political theatrics that laid the groundwork for Mussolini’s mannerisms long before the recent controversy around a “gesture” by Trump advisor and mogul Elon Musk.
D’Annunzio (1863-1938) was an an Italian poet, playwright, orator, journalist, aristocrat, and Royal Italian Army officer during World War I. He occupied a prominent place in Italian literature from 1889 to 1910 and in its political life from 1914 to 1924. D’Annunzio was associated with the Decadent movement in his literary works, which interplayed closely with French symbolism and British aestheticism. Such works represented a turn against the naturalism of the preceding Romantics and was both sensuous and mystical. He came under the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche which would find outlets in his literary and later political contributions.
Although D’Annunzio had a strong influence on the ultranationalist ideology of Benito Mussolini, he never became directly involved in fascist government politics in Italy. After the collapse of his Republic of Fiume in 1921, he retired to his villa on Lake Como where he lived until his death in 1938. It is interesting that Mussolini came to power in Italy as Prime Minister only one year later in 1922. The appeal of fascism is still present today – and the possible parallels to events in United States today are worth noting.
