Rotterdam Winners: Gabriele D’Annunzio Picture ‘Fiume O Morte!’ & ‘Raptures’ Win Top Prizes

deadline.com:

Croatian director Igor Bezinović’s documentary Fiume o Morte! exploring the complex figure of Italian poet and playwright Gabriele D’Annunzio has won the top Tiger Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR).

The film also won the FIPRESCI Award for standout in the main Tiger Competition. Mixing dramatic reconstruction and documentary, the feature explores D’Annunzio’s attempts to annex the city of Fiume (now Rijeka in Croatia) to Italy in the aftermath of the First World War, as a result of his outrage at the outcome of the Paris Peace Conference, which proposed handing the city to Yugoslavia.

The Tiger Competition Jury consisted of Yuki Aditya, Winnie Lau, Peter Strickland, and Andrea Luka Zimmerman. The Jury also initially included Soheila Golestani (The Seed of the Sacred Fig), but she was prevented from leaving Iran due to a travel ban. “This is a film where people and public spaces are used as co-conspirators in exploring the past through the prism of contemporary Europe.

At times of the rise of ultra-nationalism within a contemporary European context, the film playfully grapples with the past not as a closed chapter, but as a living reality,” they wrote in their summing up of their choice.