(Igor Bezinović, 2025, Croatia/Italy/Slovenia, 114 minutes)

The city of Rijeka, a port city on the Adriatic Sea and a key location in Thomas Pynchon’s new novel Shadow Ticket, is part of Croatia, but it has long been fought over between Italy, the former Yugoslavia, and others. Most stunningly, the Italian poet/soldier/proto-fascist Gabriele D’Annunzio led a 1919 invasion of the city, then called Fiume, in an act of nearly unfathomable hubris. (D’Annunzio is perhaps best known by the cinephiles among us as the screenwriter for the 1914 Italian superspectacle Cabiria.) Croation director Igor Bezinović made this hybrid narrative/documentary to explore what the city’s population know and think about D’Annunzio now, through street interviews, reenactments, and more. With seven actors playing D’Annunzio (all bald, a detail important to Bezinović), Fiume o morte! (“Fiume or death!”) is a fun and irreverent approach to a jaw-dropping bit of world history.

In Croatian, Italian, and Fiuman with English subtitles.