Ready for a peculiar lesson in European history, which the Rotterdam film festival is serving up this weekend? Following World War I and the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, both Italy and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, which later became Yugoslavia, laid claim to the city of Fiume, now known as Rijeka in Croatia. The Paris Peace Conference proposed handing the city to what would later become Yugoslavia. But negotiations over the future of the city in 1919 were interrupted when on Sept. 12 a force of Italian nationalists led by Italian poet, aristocrat, and army officer Gabriele D’Annunzio ended up occupying it for 16 months.
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.
Writer and director Igor Bezinović (A Brief Excursion) 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. The hybrid film Fiume o morte!, which translates as Rijeka or Death!, gets its world premiere in the Tiger Competition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) on Sunday.
D’Annunzio may not be a household name around the world but he left a big mark on the city and was given a state funeral by Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini. And in 1920, the Italian community of New York City organized a Fiume Day at City College Stadium in New York on Fiume Day to celebrate the anniversary of the occupation of the city, with Enrico Caruso singing on the occasion.
“Combining archive footage, informative documentary interludes, interviews with cast members and dramatic reconstructions that capture the spirit of the era, Fiume o morte! grapples with the ultranationalist views that underpinned D’Annunzio’s actions,” reads an IFFR synopsis. “Far from a conventional history lesson, it interrogates how the past informs the present, reflecting on the persistence of extremist ideologies in contemporary society.” One interviewee featured in the film even notes: “They’re still around today, unfortunately. We just don’t know who they are.”
Check out a trailer for Fiume o morte! here.
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 tells THR. “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.”
There is a reason why he chose a hybrid approach for the movie. “It’s like a history lesson but retold in a fun way,” he explains. “In high school, I didn’t like history that much because I didn’t have a good storyteller, and history is basically about the art of telling a story. You can combine storytelling with facts, and it doesn’t have to be terribly boring. It can be fun.”
The filmmaker also sees the story as a universal one given the rise of populism in politics around the world.
“For the American audience, I think parallels between Trump and D’Annunzio will be so obvious,” he argues, for example. 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.
Given people’s different takes on history and the fact that there are many pieces to this historical puzzle, Bezinović lets different people play D’Annunzio and function as narrators throughout Fiume o morte! “You can perceive t D’Annunzio in many possible ways. I don’t want to serve you an ultimate
truth,” he shares. “I thought about it as a very ambitious puzzle. When we were editing the film, it was editing on four levels: there was the historic level telling the story; another level is reconstructions; the third level is the interchanging of actors playing D’Annunzio; and the fourth level is the changing of the narrators. If you watch the film for a second time, you’ll maybe notice that all these narrators are also playing in the film. And there are so many things happening in the film that you basically can’t follow all four lines at the same time, but your mind just drifts.”
That is deliberate. “My great editor Hrvoslava Brkušić, this is the third feature that we worked on together, really did an amazing job with this parallelism,” the filmmaker says. “When you exit the cinema, you come out with a feeling. And we want you to carry out the feeling that you saw something complex and big.” After all, history and life are also complex. “Let’s not always see simplicity as a value,” he urges.
Speaking of complex, or complicated, things. What was the relationship between D’Annunzio and Mussolini? “When Mussolini came to power, he basically, as we show in the film, let D’Annunzio buy a villa for not a big amount of money,” explains Bezinović. “He lives in that villa, but he’s basically isolated from official Italian politics because Mussolini doesn’t want to be a fascist duce with another fascist duce elsewhere.”
But whether the Fiume leader should be called a fascist is a matter of debate in Italy because “he never enrolled the fascist official fascist party,” he notes. “But he was kept by the fascists as a spiritual leader. He’s a heavy nationalist, he’s an imperialist, he wants to conquer the Eastern Adriatic and uses military force. And for me, these elements are quite enough to call a person a fascist.”
Quite a few photos and their re-enactments featured in the film are of young men and often on beaches. That is because a slew of them came from Italy and had little to do over the summer following the occupation. “It’s a story that does not really have a clear narrative. Some see it as something heroic, but from my perspective, it’s a military occupation. But also, it’s 10,000 young guys coming with guns. So what I was fascinated by while reading about this story was the fact that they had so much fun. It’s also clear that the citizens didn’t have that much fun, but the soldiers did. It is crazy.”
Bezinović says more than 10,000 photos were taken, and “they basically continued taking photos on the beaches.” Some reports of the period though claim that the young men consumed cocaine and were “nude all the time and having orgies,” the writer-director notes. “I simply find it a terrible exaggeration, because when you enter the archives, you realize that it’s very hard to find anecdotes about coke. You can find almost nothing on nudity. There’s one single photo of a nude person” posing as Poseidon in the sea, which shows up in the film. “But for that picture, which is an iconic photo of the occupation, it’s not even verified that it was taken in Rijeka.” Concluded the filmmaker: “This idea of Fiume as this new paradise is simply not true.”
One recurring character of the film is Krissa, D’Annunzio’s beloved greyhound. “There is a photo of D’Annunzio in his residence in which he’s surrounded by 10 or 15 greyhounds. He was obsessed with dogs,” explains Bezinović, also sharing: “Animals are extremely important in my films. Somebody noticed that in my previous shorts and also fiction work you always have some animal passing through. So in this case, I really wanted to have the dog. By the way, his name is Bob. He’s the greyhound of my mother’s best friend, and he’s a male, while Krissa was a female. We also have a platypus and a woman carrying a little puppy. I chose all the photos that had some animals in them. I deliberately wanted to have them in the film.”
The creative also highlights the personal importance of the project. “I wanted to make a film about my city and about history. It was my life project because it involved my home city and so much work on so many levels,” says Bezinović. “We’re inviting you to this game. If you want to have fun with us, jump on board. But I wouldn’t be surprised at all if some people in Italy will say that it’s a falsification of history, although it’s completely based on facts.”
The filmmaker has one more thing he wants to emphasize. “I wouldn’t spend all these years making this film if I was just making a film about a crazy dictator. What I wanted to do is to tell a story about Rijeka that some people in my city will be able to retell to the next generations. Some kid in high school will finally be able to learn this story about our city that I didn’t have the opportunity to learn. And maybe some sociology or history teachers will just play this film and say, ‘Oh, this is a film that a guy made about our city 50 years ago. He’s not with us anymore, but let’s see the film. That would be the biggest reward.”
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