Lightdox Boards Rotterdam Tiger Competition Entry ‘Fiume O Morte!,’ About Italian Nationalist Poet Gabriele D’Annunzio (EXCLUSIVE)

variety.com:

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Sales company Lightdox has boarded Igor Bezinović‘s hybrid documentary “Fiume o morte!,” which premieres in the Tiger Competition section of the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

The Croatian-Italian-Slovenian coproduction takes the audience back to 1919, when the Italian nationalist poet, dandy and preacher of war Gabriele D’Annunzio occupied the city of Fiume. “Today, the citizens of Fiume, now called Rijeka, retell and reinterpret the bizarre story about the 16-month occupation of their city in a brutally factual yet defiantly punk cinematic journey,” a statement explains. “‘Fiume o morte!’ is a film on poetry, dynamite, cocaine, machine guns, football, airplanes, furniture flying out of windows, concerts, prisons, sunbathing, thousands of soldiers, millions of bullets, endless speeches, a platypus and on the power of political performativity.

D’Annunzio might as well be considered its trailblazer heralding some of the biggest masters of ghastly political showmanship of our age.” The film is Bezinović’s third feature, following “The Blockade” (2012), which received the Oktavijan prize for Best Croatian Documentary in 2012, and “A Brief Excursion” (2017), which premiered in Rotterdam’s Bright Future strand in 2017.

Bezinović comments: “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.