FIUME O MORTE! Documentary

Winner of both the Tiger Award and the FIPRESCI prize at this year’s Rotterdam Film Festival, Croatian director Igor Bezinović’s inventive hybrid documentary 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. D’Annunzio was a celebrated Italian poet, playwright and army general who besieged and occupied the Adriatic port of Fiume in 1919. Incensed that the city — long part of the now dissolved Austro-Hungarian Empire, would be ceded to the newly formed Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia) despite its large Italian population — D’Annunzio mustered a few thousand troops and invaded, intending to annex the city to Italy. But Italy wanted no part of this folly, and after 15 months, D’Annunzio and his forces retreated. Bezinović reclaims this odd but essential chapter in his native city’s history, misremembered when it’s remembered at all, by recruiting hundreds of Rijeka locals to recreate scenes from D’Annunzio’s siege, on the streets and in the buildings where events occurred a century earlier. 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. –Todd Hitchcock