The City’s Ghostly Past: Igor Bezinovic’s Fiume O Morte!
The winner of the FIPRESCI award at the 54th International Rotterdam Film Festival is a playful yet profound exploration of a too-little-known episode of European history and its relevance for our current, troubled times. Whilst full of dry, self-reflexive humour, the film manages to use archival footage and reenactments to provide incisive commentary on the rise of the global far-right. The jury was impressed by the film’s effortless combination of experimentation and accessibility, which serves to convey a timely warning against the formation of authoritarianism.
Igor Bezinovic’s Fiume O Morte! begins in a manner that is, literally, quite pedestrian: in the Croatian port city of Rijeka, passersby are asked about their knowledge of Gabriele D’Annunzio. Most of the interviewees have indeed heard of the man who played a central role in their city’s troubled history. In the aftermath of the First World War, D’Annunzio, an ultranationalist Italian poet, playwright, aristocrat, and war hero, successfully brought Rijeka, then called Fiume, under his control and created a self-proclaimed city state within what would later be called Yugoslavia. After compiling some of the contemporary citizens’ knowledge about D’Annunzio, Bezinovic asks them a follow-up question: would you be willing to perform a role in a reenactment of his life?
In typical post-modern style, the film then treats its audience to a charming montage of the non-professional actors auditioning for various roles in the film, including, most importantly, the role of D’Annunzio himself. Men of all ages (all of them bald) are interviewed for this central role and quizzed about their background—among them are a musician, a streetsweeper, and a former general—and their motivation to play this historical figure. Eventually, all of them will end up playing the wannabe-dictator at various points of his life and provide their own unique perspective on his simultaneoulsy menacing and ridiculous persona. In this casting phase, Fiume O Morte! calls to mind Kitty Green’s excellent meta-documentary Casting JonBenet (2017), which adopts a similarly transparent style to expose the mechanisms of the true-crime genre.
However, Fiume O Morte! is less interested in dismantling genre conventions. Instead, Bezinovic’s intention is more ambitious: his re-staging of the countless archived photographs and film recordings documenting D’Annunzio’s reign of terror aims for a kind of temporal destabilization in which his city’s past and present merge and play out in tandem. Often, this is effectively played for laughs. For example, when one of the actors playing D’Annunzio reenacts a fiery speech held on the same City Hall balcony as the actual historical event, a zoom-out reveals that instead of cheering masses, only the actor’s wife and son have come by to support his acting ambitions. Scenes like these highlight the absurdity of D’Annunzio’s reign, now a mere footnote of history.
Other scenes are more unsettling. They remind us that, while easily forgotten, fascism is very much alive in 2025 and, since its defeat during World War II, more ready than ever to fully reestablish itself. In one scene, an old building, now a run-of-the-mill nail salon, is quickly returned to its earlier purpose, namely D’Annunzio’s headquarters, in which violent raids were planned and, allegedly, wild orgies took place. In the film’s spatiotemporal vision of Rijeka/Fiume, this violent past is only ever a few cuts and costume changes away. Later in the film, the director’s voice-over alerts us to an old mural, mostly covered in plaster, which depicts D’Annunzio’s proclamation of his “regency.” Again, the city’s totalitarian past is shown to be hidden underneath the thinnest of surfaces.
Another scene brilliantly encapsulates the film’s mixture of humour, melancholy, and historical analysis: a woman passing by the film set approaches an actor who is playing one of D’Annunzio’s soldiers, fully costumed in fascist regalia. Why is he doing this, she enquires, apparently unaware of the nature of the film. “I’m only acting,” he replies. But she is having none of it: instead of wasting his youth as a fascist, he should be out dancing with a girl, she insists. While the comedic timing of this un-staged dialogue couldn’t be more perfect, it also works as a ghost-like encounter with the past: within the film’s ambiguous sense of time, the woman is trying to talk sense to a radicalised youth from the early 20th century.
Fiume O Morte! thus emerges as a powerful reflection on the traces of history in the present, always surrounding us, tempting us to return, warning us to not repeat our mistakes. The film’s outlook is not necessarily hopeful, and how could it be, focussed as it is on a city which has seen so much violence and turmoil. “Rijeka lies in a country called Croatia,” Bezinovic said in his acceptance speech for the festival’s Tiger Award, “but considering the times we live in, that might change more quickly than we expect.” If there is hope to be found, it rests in the people of Rijeka, which the film depicts as funny, curious, and resistant.
Tim Lindemann
Edited by Jose Teodoro
Copyright FIPRESCI