Film writer Savina Petkova discusses Fiume o morte! (Fiume or death!) with its director, Igor Bezinović. In defiance of the Paris Peace Conference Italian poet and military officer Gabriele D’Annunzio led a rogue, short-lived, and ultranationalist occupation of Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia) in 1919. Over a century later, filmmaker Igor Bezinović revisits this strange historical episode, blending archive, reenactment and interviews with residents in the present, interrogating how a city remembers and forgets, and the enduring presence of European fascism.

A stark and peculiar lesson in the history that is not past, Fiume o morte! won the Tiger Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2025 and is Croatia’s submission for the Oscars.