Fiume o Morte!

Igor Bezinović's Fiume o Morte! won the European Film Award for Best Documentary in 2025 and was shortlisted for the EFA Best Film. The film consolidated Bezinović, after his earlier The Blockade (2012) and A Brief Excursion (2017), as one of the most distinctive contemporary Croatian documentary filmmakers. The title quotes Gabriele D'Annunzio's 1919 occupation of Fiume (Italian for Fiume or Death) the right-wing-poet-led occupation of the Adriatic city after World War I that produced one of the early prefigurations of the Italian Fascist movement.

The documentary uses a local community network in the contemporary Croatian city of Rijeka (Fiume's modern name) to assemble a multi-voice portrait of how the D'Annunzio occupation has been remembered, mythologised, suppressed and re-encountered across the century since. The film operates as a sustained methodological experiment in collective documentary memory-construction: dozens of Rijeka residents (historians, schoolchildren, anti-fascist activists, descendants of the occupation's participants) contribute their own visualisations of the historical material.

Bezinović's commitment to a register of playful-but-serious historical engagement (the film deploys reenactments, school-classroom seminars, archive footage and contemporary city walks in alternating chapters) produced a documentary that has been compared favourably to Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing in its methodological audacity. The film's broader subject (how a city remembers its own fascist prehistory) has become continuingly relevant in contemporary European political discourse.