Following its world premiere and exceptional success at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, where it won the festival’s main award as well as the FIPRESCI Prize, and after outstanding audience numbers in its first two weeks of release, Igor Bezinović’s Fiume o morte! is coming to Split. The Split premiere will take place on Sunday, 2 March at 8 pm at the Croatian National Theatre Split, as part of the FMFS in the Theatre programme, realised through a collaboration between the Croatian National Theatre Split and the Mediterranean Film Festival Split.
Fiume o morte! is an original film that, through a highly innovative style, explores a fascinating historical episode largely unknown to the wider public. The film addresses the event in which Italian poet and war advocate Gabriele D’Annunzio occupied the city of Rijeka around a hundred years ago. The film has so far delighted both critics and audiences across the country – in the first two weeks of cinema distribution alone, Fiume o morte! was seen by more than 6,000 viewers.
Tickets for the Split premiere can be purchased HERE.
Poetry, cocaine, dynamite, rifles, football, aeroplanes, furniture flying through windows, concerts, prisons, sunbathing, thousands of soldiers, millions of bullets, endless speeches and even one peculiar platypus… all of these are elements of one of the most bizarre occupations in human history. Through this film, the citizens of Rijeka were given the opportunity, a century later, to reclaim history and tell their own version of events.
Award-winning filmmaker Bezinović, recipient of the Grand Golden Arena for Best Feature Film for A Brief Excursion in 2017, examines the consequences of the occupation of the city on both the city itself and its inhabitants in an exceptionally creative way. In search of answers, he engaged numerous citizens of Rijeka – known in Italian as Fiume – who recount, reconstruct and reinterpret the bizarre story of the 16-month occupation of their city in 1919 by Italian poet, dandy and war preacher Gabriele D’Annunzio.
Through an innovative approach, Bezinović brings this fascinating historical episode to life, creating a film unlike anything previously seen in Croatian cinema, offering a bold stylistic leap marked by playfulness and creativity.
The film was produced by Restart, with producers Vanja Jambrović and Tibor Keser, in co-production with Slovenia’s Nosorogi (co-producer Marina Gumzi) and Italy’s Videomante (co-producer Erica Barbiani). The trailer and teaser were edited by Iva Kraljević.
