Fiume O Morte!

 

Gabriele D'Annunzio

D'Annunzio (in the middle with the stick) in Fiume, 1919

D'Annunzio (in the middle in uniform) with Italian publisher Arnoldo Mondadori

Director Igor Bezinović

Gabriele D’Annunzio, September 1919

Elon Musk Roman/fascist salute during Trump inauguration, January 2025

FIUME O MORTE!               B+                                                                                         Croatia  Italy  Slovenia  (112 mi)  2025  d: Igor Bezinović

Director Statement, Igor Bezinović

By making this film I wanted to get to know the past of my hometown Rijeka/Fiume, but also to get to understand its present state from a new perspective. During this process I’ve met hundreds of my fellow citizens who wanted to work on the film in front of the camera or behind it. I’ve met drivers, politicians, dustbin collectors, archivists, doormen, cooks, musicians, professors, translators and waiters who all had ideas about what this film should be like. I’ve also met historians of all kinds, from those who saw D’Annunzio as the crazier version of Mussolini to the ones who saw him as the Italian Che Guevara.

Besides meeting new people I’ve also read thousands and thousands of pages on D’Annunzio in Fiume, and while doing it I was not only gathering facts but was also shaping my own political ideas.

One idea, however, stayed clear to me all the way. That idea is formulated in a political pamphlet published in Fiume in 1922, soon after D’Annunzio’s departure: “Long live Fiume, free and independent from any kind of rescuers, liberators and protectors!”

I made a film with my fellow citizens and for my fellow citizens, building a chronological story that we’ll be able, I hope, to retell to new generations. I also hope that our film will help the audiences outside of Rijeka think about how much they know about the histories of their own hometowns and about how these histories got remembered and retold.

In his lesser-known essay from 1960, Pier Paolo Pasolini calls D’Annunzio’s occupation of Fiume a “pagliacciata narcisistica,” “a narcissistic farce.” D’Annunzio saw Fiume as a personal playground, as a place where he could experiment and practice everything that came to his mind.

By making this film I wanted to keep D’Annunzio’s idea of Rijeka/Fiume as a playground, but this time the citizens of Rijeka are the ones who are playing.

Far-right authoritarianism is on the rise around the world, threatening democracies everywhere, with its fascist clutches gripping even the United States, as this film conveys a timely warning against the rise of global far-right authoritarianism.  Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was the blueprint model for the American right wing, apparently enthralled by the ease in how he systematically dismantled the country’s legal system and changed the election system to ensure future election victories.  By rigging the elections and at the same time stripping the nation’s legal authority to challenge the results, Orbán was also withdrawing media licenses for independent journalists, with ownership of the media increasingly shifting to oligarchs allied with Prime Minister Orbán’s government, making state-owned broadcasters controlled by the ruling party.  If this doesn’t sound like what’s happening in America right now, then you haven’t been paying attention.  But it’s not just happening here, as there are examples throughout history, with this Croatian filmmaker taking a look back at his own country’s turbulent history one hundred years ago, where he decides to recreate a little-known moment in history, while having a little fun in the process, creating a visionary, boldly inventive work of art that is original and genuinely eye opening, while at the same time informative.  Coming from the last generation of Tito’s pioneers, Union of Pioneers of Yugoslavia, Igor Bezinović is a filmmaker born in Rijeka, graduating in film directing at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb and in Philosophy, Sociology, and Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb.  Nestled in an inlet of the Adriatic Sea, Rijeka/Fiume is now the third largest city in Croatia, but it has frequently changed hands throughout history, changing its country of origin at least nine different times in the 20th century alone, as just after WWI it belonged to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, before that partly the Kingdom of Italy and partly the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and before that the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, before that the Free State of Fiume, before that the Italian Regency of Carnaro, and before that the Austro-Hungarian Empire. 

That’s a bit of a swallow, so to make things easier to comprehend, Bezinović asks citizens of his own city if they know who Gabriele D’Annunzio is, getting many different answers, but most do not, as he’s a forgotten footnote in history, which the filmmaker delightfully brings back to life with the participation of around 100 non‑professional actors and extras, not unlike what Robert Greene constructed with Bisbee '17 (2018), where it’s 30-minutes in before the title card appears, named after his political slogan.  What defines our identity?  What makes us who we are?  Combining archival footage of one of the most photographed events of the time, including video footage, interviews, and reenactments, Bezinović engages about three hundred locals to re-enact a rather surreal 16-month occupation in 1919 when D’Annunzio declared himself the de facto dictator of Fiume, the Italian name for the city, as the decadent Italian poet, playwright, orator, journalist, aristocrat, flamboyant public persona, and Royal Italian Army officer during World War I preached an ultra-right Italian nationalism after the war that was a predecessor to Benito Mussolini’s full-blown fascism.  Bezinović ironically remarks at the beginning of the film that the “film represents a mirror of today’s time,” while visually exploring buildings and streets that bore D’Annunzio’s name during the fascist period, noting “My Italian colleagues warned me not to mention fascism too much in the intro for the sake of Italian viewers, so I’ll stop here.”  But if truth be told, he doesn’t exactly heed their suggestion, as the film is praised in Croatia while attracting little attention in Italy, where D’Annunzio is still celebrated in Italy as a national hero, erecting a statue in Trieste about seventy kilometers away on the 100th anniversary of the occupation of Fiume, with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni photographed in front of it, praising D’Annunzio as a man who ruled “with courage and audacity,” while in Croatia he is remembered as a megalomaniacal fascist occupier. 

Amusingly shot by Gregor Božič, there are seven different bald-headed actors drawn from the city streets who play D’Annunzio, with Bezinović announcing each change, while the narrators keep changing as well, each adding a different aspect.  The story of D’Annunzio’s occupation is narrated in the local Fiumano language, a variety of the Venetian dialect historically spoken by the Italian community of Fiume, yet as Bezinović notes in the first parts of the film, this is “no longer spoken or understood by most people in Rijeka,” yet the changing languages is a realistic aspect that reflects upon the city itself, part of the cosmopolitan, multi-cultural history of Rijeka and part of the linguistic tapestry in present-day Croatia, where that diversity is something D’Annunzio despised yet the film revels in, pretty much rubbing our noses in it.  Like Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude, it’s the irreverent absurdity that stands out, where modern-day re-enactments show how the events of the past are still a living reality, yet restaging history in this way also makes it easier to remember, as despite the dry facts on display, what stands out is the mocking tone of the filmmaker, who is not making fun of history, but how it can be remembered today, as the film is much more entertaining and fun than any description implies, where D’Annunzio is a model for contemporary right-wing populists across Europe and elsewhere.  Nearly ten years in the making, Bezinović draws from a treasure trove of 10,000 archival photographs while also using ordinary citizens from town to restage those same images, starting in the present, showing historical pictures of demolished bridges and buildings, and then showing those same sites in Rijeka today, a port city on Kvarner Bay in the northern Adriatic Sea, with plenty of cars and pedestrian traffic buzzing by.  Yet it’s the tongue-in-cheek narration that stands out, continually conveying a message where reviving interest in the city’s history is an essential message, as it makes us pause and take notice, reminding us this has happened before, so maybe we should pay attention to see how this plays out. 

Employing a hybrid, experimental format and satiric restaging technique used in Radu Jude’s I Don't Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians (Îmi este indiferent daca în istorie vom intra ca barbari) (2018), this is a performative historiography that reconfigures memory through reenactment, documentary observation, archival reappropriation, and collective performances in which contemporary residents of Rijeka restage the historical events.  Focusing on the 1919–1921 occupation of the city of Rijeka/Fiume by the Italian writer and political rabble rouser Gabriele D’Annunzio, who ruled without being elected, the film critically examines the tactics of performance, manipulation, and propaganda employed during the siege, as D’Annunzio was one of the biggest masters of ghastly political showmanship of his time that would ultimately lead to Mussolini, using political theater as a staged reality where the power of pageantry is showcased through a masquerade of images, gestures, and myth as much as through force, exposing the constructed and contingent nature of historical narratives by fragmenting identity, transforming the city into a living memoryscape, FIUME O MORTE! Clip YouTube (1:29). Reflecting on the persistence of extremist ideologies in contemporary society, this is skillfully achieved through participatory performances involving those who live in the city today, as history and memory emerge, skillfully and cohesively edited together by Hrvoslava Brkusic.  At the same time, the film articulates a critical stance towards militarism, political spectacle, and nationalist imagery, positioning memory as a site of communal engagement and critical confrontation with both the past and the present, subversively diagnosing the legacy of fascism.  Winner of the 1st place Tiger Award and Fipresci Prize at the 2025 International Film Festival of Rotterdam, this is the most-watched film in the sixteen years of existence of Rijeka’s 300-seat arthouse Art-kino Theater, and the most-watched documentary in Croatia of all time.

The end of WWI transformed Rijeka/Fiume into a politically contested terrain, where at the time the Rječina River divided it from Sušak, an adjacent town with a predominantly Croatian population which has now been united into one larger city.  Entering the city in a caravan of trucks carrying guns, ammunition, supplies, and soldiers, the so-called legionnaires, D’Annunzio wanted to annex the city for Italy in defiance of his own government, dissatisfied with the outcome of the Paris Peace Conference which proposed handing over the city to the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia), angered by what he considered to be the surrender of an Italian city.  Italy had not, however, made any demands on Rijeka/Fiume, but had instead forgone it in favor of Croatia, leading to a transitory period, the rule of D’Annunzio, where the Italian Regency of Carnaro was a self-proclaimed independent state, as they were successful in seizing control of the city and forced the withdrawal of the Allied occupying forces.  The Italian government opposed this and attempted to pressure D'Annunzio into withdrawing by initiating a blockade of Fiume.  When Italy sought a referendum in Fiume on D’Annunzio’s government, he first agreed but, realizing the vote was against him, sent in the troops to disrupt the vote and nullify the result.  Is anyone in America paying attention?   The song Giovinezza (Youth) is frequently performed, a piece sung by D’Annunzio’s legionnaires during the occupation and later adopted as the anthem of Mussolini’s Italian National Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista), anthem of the PNF (1924 lyrics, two verses only) YouTube (2:29).  In what was a dry run for fascism, developing in the early stages, D’Annunzio was never formally a member of the fascist movement, though virtually the entire ritual of fascism was invented by him during his occupation of Fiume where he popularized the black shirts (the Arditi), the Roman/fascist salute, the cries of “Eia, eia, eia! Alala!” taken from Achilles’ cry in The Iliad, and the balcony speeches featuring flamboyant rhetoric engaging with a frenzied crowd, all of which later became symbolic pillars of fascism.  

Later ruling with similar charismatic flamboyance, Mussolini was impressed, adapting many of the same strategies, from D’Annunzio’s authoritarian interventions like censorship and violent repression, to the regulation of public life, including the prohibition of the Rijeka Carnival, strikes, and unauthorized public gatherings, while also having his hand in the promulgation of ambitious charters and the entire choreography of uniformed street parades and ceremonies.  Yet while amassing his authoritarian power, D’Annunzio also personally enjoyed cocaine and lavishly eccentric parties, which the Italians reduce to avant-gardism and an eccentric personality, always considering him a great poet, completely overlooking the violent impact of his fascist rule.  While he’s the star of the show, the protagonist in every sense of the word, and a worshipped celebrity, the film is really about the city of Rijeka, the city’s historically fluid and multi-layered identity, and how it survived this occupation, where over the end credits we see the cast celebrating the lively Carnival together after the shooting ends.  In embodying this more complex plurality, the filmmaker subverts the exclusive and homogenizing nationalist agenda advocated by D’Annunzio himself, who described the non-Italian residents of the city as “Slavic bastards” and “filthy Croats,” destroying their buildings in a hate-based agenda aimed at a radical Italianization of the city.  A true “essay film,” Bezinović foregrounds the instability and performative construction of historical identity, while at the same time reveals how interpretations that focus exclusively on the aesthetic or eccentric dimensions of D’Annunzio’s occupation ultimately lead only to confusion, obscuring its darker sides of violence, repression, the dangers of political idolatry, and especially its protofascist tendencies, foreshadowing the many other authoritarians who are yet to come, where we are reminded that billionaire Elon Musk performed the Roman/fascist salute at the second inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump.   

Happyend

 

how the security system sees the students

Writer/director Neo Sora

director on the set

Music Research Club

HAPPYEND              B                                                                                                           Japan  USA  Singapore  Great Britain  (113 mi)  2024  d: Neo Sora

The systems that define people are crumbling in Tokyo.  Something big is about to change.     —opening screen innertitle

One day, a school teacher                                                                                                    Lectured before his students                                                                                                        “If you don’t get 100 points in the test                                                                                            You won’t become worthy people”                                                                                                  Eat shit and die!                                                                                                                            Eat shit and die!                                                                                                                              The most important thing in the world is a computer.

—Eat Shit and Die, a protest song by Okabayashi Nobuyasu, 1969

Made by the son of legendary film composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, Sora was born in New York, raised in both New York and Tokyo, graduating from Philosophy and Film Studies at Wesleyan University, he is a filmmaker and installation artist, where this film grew out of a writer’s workshop at the Sundance Institute Screenwriters and Director’s Lab.  Having gone to a Quaker school from fourth grade through high school, Sora was anything but a rebel, so this subject may have held a special appeal for him.  Something of a throwback to Takeshi Kitano’s KIDS RETURN (1996), Toshiaki Toyoda’s Blue Spring (Aoi haru) (2001), or Shunji Iwai’s ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU-CHOU (2001), though not really a marked improvement on any of those films, while more recently Japanese films have offered political critiques through social realism, like Hirokazu Koreeda’s Shoplifters (Manbiki kazoku) (2018), or South Korea’s Bong Joon-ho with his Oscar-winning Parasite (Gisaengchung) (2019).  Yet this is a colder more sterile existence of a high school film set in the near future of a dystopian Tokyo, where the streets are always eerily empty, continually under the constant threat of emergency earthquake alerts, with a familiar student musical chant reminding us, “The most important thing in the world is a computer,” which is part of the Eat Shit and Die protest song by Okabayashi Nobuyasu that was banned in the late 60’s for its political content.  Basically a film that shows what it means to be a young person growing up in Japan today, this technologically forward world is a reminder of how easily it is to lose our humanity in the advancing pursuit of progress, as we tend to forget the bonds that tie us all together.  This film is far more politicized, though viewed from a disgruntled youth point of view, where authority figures tend to be far-right with fascist and xenophobic tendencies, demeaning foreigners as not really being Japanese, which has an overly divisive way of being racist and demeaning, with the government projecting messages onto the clouds, where the sky itself is turned into an advertising billboard.  While policy decisions start at the top, they have a way of being felt even in high school, which is a social stratosphere unto itself, with the film challenging the commonly held assumptions about Japan as harmonious, homogeneous, and traditional, where there’s a sense of dread and doom that pervades the film mixed with the joy and energy of youth.  Essentially a coming-of-age story as we follow two high school students on the verge of graduation, as the film's plot revolves around the personal friendship between two characters who struggle over their differences on how they view the world around them, the mischievous Yuta (Hayato Kurihara), always wearing headphones around his neck, who comes from a more privileged background, and the brooding Kou (model and track and field athlete Yukito Hidaka), who is a “Special Permanent Resident,” a 4th generation Zainichi Korean living in Japan (Zainichi Koreans in Japan: Exploring the Ethnic Minority's ...), two childhood friends since kindergarten that go everywhere together.  With aspirations of becoming a DJ, often seen stealing school musical equipment, they hang with a musically-inspired clique of five that includes class clown Ata-Chan (Yûta Hayashi) and half-Chinese Ming (Shina Peng), who eventually become a couple, and a lone black character in Tomu (Arazi), rare in Asian films, whose father was black American, becoming something of a diplomatic peacemaker in all their squabbles before heading off to college in America and reluctantly leaving his friends behind.

Coming from a director who has shown an admiration for films like Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955), François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959), and Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day (Gu ling jie shao nian sha ren shi jian) (1991), Sora takes his own read on the contemporary sociopolitical climate through the emotional turbulence of late adolescence, and in doing so captures the intensity of teenage angst.  After sneaking into a nightclub to witness a muscular DJ in action (Yousuke Yukimatsu), where we find ourselves in the middle of an exhilarating light sequence for pulsating techno music until the police arrive and shut the place down, but Yuta and Kou aren’t done, as they decide to sneak past the guards in the middle of the night to play their own edgy techno music in a room they’ve designated as their “Music Research Club” (with a total of five members), creating even more havoc afterwards with an ingenious school prank, turning the Principal’s prized yellow sports car on its end like an obelisk, where it appears like an avant garde art display the next morning, with students surrounding it in awe and astonishment, wondering how they did it, and by who, many of them laughing with glee while taking pictures with their phones.  An infuriated Principal (Shirō Sano), a cartoonish, one-dimensional character who appears more like a villain, describes this as an act of terrorism (which he doesn’t really believe, but he uses this to justify his own nefarious inclinations), sending all of the students to homeroom for police questioning.  Curiously enough, the boys conveniently show up without their phones (hidden in a student’s desk), so their whereabouts on the previous evening could not be tracked.  It’s hard to make a rebellious youth movie with all the students dressed exactly alike in standard uniforms, dark pants or skirts and white shirts or blouses, where conformity is a behavior modification to produce obedience and acceptance of the prevailing moral order, but students always find creative ways to resist authority.  With Ata-Chan joking that he might want to grow up as a cop, as there will always be delinquents around, like Yuta and Kou, this produces an element of seriousness, as one of the more radicalized students, Fumi (Kilala Inori), offers a surprising comeback that leaves them speechless, “The cops are bureaucrats with weapons who protect the wealth of a country and its rich.”  This viewpoint appears aimed at the nation’s government, as the Prime Minister (Shunsaku Yajima) routinely goes on television with false catastrophic warnings of coming earthquakes, which is an authoritarian way of controlling the behavior of the public through fear, basically ingraining obedience, where schools use a similar technique, as Japan prides itself on how safe it keeps its society.  In response to the incident, the school installs a sophisticated, AI facial recognition surveillance system capable of identifying students and their behavior, capturing everything from dress code violations, leaving classrooms early, smoking, or even getting too close to another student, like holding hands or kissing, which is instantly reported on a huge screen in the building’s courtyard so everyone can see, students and teachers alike, immediately issuing point deductions which ring up like a video game, yet can prevent graduation or lead to expulsion.

Students react differently to the surveillance intrusion, with some instantly mocking it, while others simply ignore its presence and the over-controlling ramifications, where the film essentially becomes a collective struggle on the loss of freedom and the struggle for human rights against a repressive authority represented by their school, police, and digital surveillance.  When a Self-Defense Force military instructor arrives to a classroom, anyone who is not a Japanese citizen is forced to leave, like Kou, Ming, and Tomu, an overtly xenophobic act of discrimination, mirroring the views of the government, which relentlessly blames crime rates on non-citizens, recalling the Kantō Massacre of 1923 which followed a massive earthquake one hundred years earlier, targeting mainly ethnic Koreans who were accused of poisoning water wells, with roaming murderous lynch mobs fueled by Korean dehumanization and false government rumors.  In an act of solidarity, the Japanese student Fumi leaves the classroom with those excluded, openly defying the rigid authority, while organizing student protests that Kou suddenly takes an interest in, as he grows quieter and more pensive with the realization that his life is directly affected by the country’s anti-immigrant policies, where his family can’t even vote in Japanese elections.  Yuta, on the other hand, having all the economic and social advantages, defers, not wanting to derail his secured future, wanting things to stay as they are.  In this way, these two kids who have been inseparable forever, are on opposite sides, with Kou questioning why Yuta would never change or grow up, remaining emotionally stunted, coasting along on the privileges he possesses.  What’s happening within the school walls echoes the rise of an authoritarian police state developing in the world outside with the Japanese Prime Minister using the threat of a cataclysmic earthquake to grant himself emergency powers and seize more absolute control.  Fumi provides a list of grievances to present to the principal about the surveillance infringement of their rights, culminating in a long, protracted sit-in, where a standoffish battle of wills develops as increasing temperatures soar, where she is determined not to break ranks, even refusing the food generously offered by the principal, but instead he is humiliated into eating a wasteful banquet of food alone, with the students completely undermining his authority by ordering their own feast.  In this dystopian world, where the practice of reading books in their original form is considered archaic and old-fashioned, the film lacks edge and raw emotion, with no real distinctive look or provocative music, as the swelling, nostalgia-themed, 80’s style synth-driven orchestral music by Brooklyn-based Lia Ouyang Rusli, perhaps an indirect tribute to his late father, feels like a huge miss, never really capturing the rebellious theme or drawing audiences into what’s uniquely relevant about this fabricated society.  Despite the challenges new technology can bring into our lives, where it literally takes over, replacing human interactions, the ramifications only come more readily into focus in the scenes featuring Fumi, who is not even part of the original clique of five, who drew all the early focus, yet she is the most politically self-aware of the students, where her challenge to authority speaks to what audiences may be thinking, wondering how this could all come about so quickly, and with so little public resistance, calling attention to the global rise of authoritarian fascism (yes, even in America) in what were once considered the most respected and influential democratic societies on the global stage.   

Note

While the title may refer to the ambiguously optimistic ending, the band Happy End in 1970 was also the first Japanese rock band to sing in Japanese.