Fiume O Morte!

May 15 at 9:00 PM
& May 16 at 2:00 PM
Michigan & State

Film | Documentary | NR | 1h 52m | 2025
International Documentary

*Individual tickets do not guarantee access to the film. All Film & VIP Pass holders receive priority entry to all films.

Igor Bezinovic’s inventive hybrid film is a defiantly punk direct-action history lesson, deadly serious yet hilariously surreal. In 1919, the Italian poet, dandy, and glorifier of war Gabriele D’Annunzio occupied the city of Fiume. The citizens of Fiume (now Croatia's Rijeka) retell and reinterpret the 16-month occupation of their city, regarded as one of the most bizarre military sieges of all time. 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 gathered a few thousand troops and invaded, intending to annex the city to Italy. Italy wanted no part of this folly, and after 15 months, D’Annunzio and his forces retreated.

A century later, Bezinovic recruits hundreds of Rijeka locals to recreate scenes from the siege on the streets and in the buildings where events occurred. FIUME O MORTE! depicts D’Annunzio as a vain, image-obsessed trailblazer of political showmanship (which should ring a bell or two), adapting the performative propaganda employed during the siege to create a descent into chaos that is shockingly prescient.