An award-winning film highlighting the history and celebrating spirit of Rijeka has just been showcased to packed houses at the city’s legendary cinema, Art-kino Croatia.
Itself a historic landmark, first showing films a century ago and revived as an independent theatre in 2012, the downtown cinema was buzzing for the screenings of Fiume o morte!, which recently won two awards at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.
Realised by Rijeka-born Igor Bezinović, the film relates the events immediately after World War I when Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio seized Rijeka and declared himself head of his own city-state.
Known as Fiume to the outside world, including the Italians and Hungarians who had laid claim to it, Rijeka was a disputed territory whose fate was tied up with the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and rise of Fascism after 1918.
But the real story lies in the people of Rijeka, hundreds of whom appear in the film, including several who play D'Annunzio himself.
Praised by Variety magazine, Fiume o morte! (‘Fiume or Death!’) uses vintage photographs and film clips, as well as dramatisations in local dialect, to create a hybrid feature-documentary with shocking echoes that resonate with the present day.