On 12 September 1919, a troop of some three hundred soldiers under the leadership of the flamboyant war-loving Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio swooped into the Northern-Adriatic port town of Fiume, now Rijeka, wanting to annex the city to Italy. Over the course of the next 16 months, during what is regarded as one of the most bizarre militant sieges of all time, his official photography team captured over 10,000 images. A century later, Rijeka-born filmmaker Igor Bezinović, along with some three hundred citizens, orchestrates a direct-action history lesson focused on the siege and its modern-day implications. The communal undertaking in historical empowerment not only revisits both facts and legends but also puts forward a social counterweight to D’Annunzio’s occupational agenda.

The result is a brutally factual yet defiantly punk cinematic journey, deadly serious yet hilariously surreal. It critically examines the tactics of performance, manipulation and propaganda employed during the siege and transgresses them to create a wild ride directly into the heart of chaos. An invitation to dare create new viewpoints, narratives, and experiences, it uncovers nationalist historiographies as effective and obstinate ideological instruments, no matter how absurd or ridiculous.

Fiume o morte! is a film on poetry, dynamite, cocaine, machine guns, football, airplanes, furniture flying out of windows, concerts, prisons, sunbathing, thousands of soldiers, millions of bullets, endless speeches, a platypus and on the power of political performativity. D’Annunzio might as well be considered its trailblazer heralding some of the biggest masters of ghastly political showmanship of our age.

Winner of the European Film Award - Documentary (2025)