Fiume o morte!

SİNELECTION in collaboration with Documentary Association of Europe

On September 12, 1919, flamboyant poet, dandy, and preacher of war, Gabriele D’Annunzio, led three hundred soldiers into the Adriatic port of Fiume (now Rijeka) to claim it for Italy. During the bizarre 16-month siege that followed, his team of photographers captured over 10,000 images. A century later, filmmaker Igor Bezinović and hundreds of citizens stage a direct-action history lesson about the occupation. This collective act revives the facts and myths of the event, creating a social counter-narrative to D’Annunzio’s nationalist project. The resulting film is a surreal punk journey that dissects and transforms the performance and propaganda of the siege. Poetry, dynamite, cocaine, machine guns, flying furniture, concerts, prisons, and political theater: Fiume o morte! deftly shows how the ghastly political showmanship of our age is indeed nothing new.

Documentary Association of Europe, founded in 2020,is a 900-member strong network supporting documentary filmmakers and workers inside and outside of Europe. We support collaboration, curation and resource-sharing; and lobby for the best conditions for documentary education, financing and distribution.