“Fiume o Morte!” is a brilliant documentary about the bizarre 16-month occupation of the city of Rijeka (or Fiume in Italian), which after the First World War found itself under international control, awaiting its destiny to be assigned to either the Kingdom of Italy or the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. During these odd times, Gabrielle D’Annunzio, an avant-garde poet, a dandy and a proto-fascist, decided to single-handedly lead the occupation of the city, as to assure it would be incorporated into the “superior” Italian homeland, and not in the hands of “Slavic thieves and Croatian wolves”, as he calls them in the film.
The film is based on the archival materials, but is not just an ordinary documentary, as it is complemented by the live-action scenes and narration which bridge the past and present, engaging locals as actors and narrators. Live-action scenes are reenactments of the events we witness through the archival materials. This way, Bezinović elegantly skips the problem of historic depiction, adding a meta-layer to the film, and furthermore demystifying the idea of distant history. And not only that, he eerily reminds us that any character in the film, a charismatic demagogue, a young enlistee or an owner whose store was looted, could truly be anyone. Narration, on the other hand, is a way for modern “Riječani” to interact with their history as a mirror of the past.
Bezinović very clearly draws a portrait of Rijeka as a city where cultures touch, interact and blend. In Interwar Fiume, Italians and Croats are clearly the main ethnic groups who inhabit the city, but Austrians, Hungarians, Slovenians and Serbs are also mentioned, as well as French, British and Vietnamese soldiers stationed there. In modern Rijeka, which in the film we see interacting with the old one, sometimes in parallel and sometimes superpositioned so that one colors the reality of the other, is still inhabited by Croats and Italians. But we also note many names and toponyms from further south into the Balkan peninsula. In the same way the past and present city interact, the film invites us to pay attention to the identities of its peoples, whom it would not even be fair to name just in one language.
In Bezinović’s film, Rijeka is an entity of its own, which is not a city associated with a particular nationality, language, culture or ideology. At the time of D’Annunzio, Rijeka was an important Hungarian port, it has Venetian history, but to whom it belongs is a wider question, and “Fiume o Morte!” clearly tells us: to everyone who lives there.
Rijeka is known as a city with a strong antifascist heritage. The story of d’Annunzio is not a story of Italian occupation of Rijeka and is not relevant today because of latent Italian threat. It is a story of a proto-fascist, relevant today because of Italian irredentism towards that era, just as much as for the global rise of illiberalism and nationalism. The director, archival materials, and people of the city who narrate the film both in Croatian and Fiumano (local dialect of Italian), clearly draw that distinction. Bezinović depicts with seeming ease that fascism, original and its contemporary recreation, is the menace, without slipping into clichés of oppressed and oppressors, just and wrong, linking them to ethnic groups, as is all too common in national historiographies all around Europe.
Played on various screens across the globe, Bezinović’s Rijeka deserves to be an example to any city striving for inclusive multicultural and independent citizenry, and is of particular relevance to the Balkan cities, as the centers of Europe’s most eclectic region. Blessed with immense diversity and punished with recurring ignorance of it, we must avoid slipping into this kind of folkloric lyricism which all too often seems like reality. Or, as the jury at the Film Festival in Rotterdam put it: “[W]e must time again create history, not just to [not] forget, but to create a world we wish exists, for all of us”.
