Igor Bezinović casts locals from his Croatian hometown to re-envision the reign of Italian poet and self-styled dictator Gabriele D’Annunzio, in a communal antidote to an era of personality cults.
Forthright, unflinching and very funny… It’s a gloriously punk spin on the historical documentary genre.
Fiume o morte! 2025
Italian decadent poet and army general Gabriele D’Annunzio tried, for a chaotic and hedonistic 15 months after World War I, to establish his own state, and occupied the seaport city of Fiume (now Croatia’s Rijeka), a strategically located city that had changed hands countless times.
Documentarian Igor Bezinović delves into this bizarre episode in the history of his own hometown, enlisting fellow citizens, from punk musicians to dustmen and war vets, to reenact episodes from the protofascist oddball’s brief, largely forgotten rule. The “Duce” had a taste for extravagant theatrics, and besides encouraging his underlings on escapades to steal outlandish gifts for him (a taxidermied platypus), he commissioned thousands of surreal photographs, which are mined for this rigorously researched but freewheeling mix of archive and anecdote.
With anarchic irreverence and wild humour, the workings of power are demystified. History is transformed into a living public square for empowering imaginations and democratic participation, suggesting that creative solidarity might be the antidote to the resurgent authoritarianism of today’s runaway madcap despots. — Carmen Gray