Fiume o morte!

Gabriele D'Annunzio, the Italian poet and nationalist, marched on Fiume in September 1919 to annex the contested Adriatic port to Italy, exploiting the ambiguity left by the post–First World War settlement that had assigned the city to neither Italy nor the new Yugoslav state. By occupying Fiume with a band of irregular soldiers, he forced the issue onto the international agenda and positioned himself as the champion of Italian irredentism. The documentary frames this act as both a personal adventure and a calculated political provocation.

Early reenactments of D'Annunzio's speeches foreshadow his later attempt to build an entire political regime around the occupation rather than simply hand the city over to Rome.

The Italian Regency of Carnaro was the short-lived state that D'Annunzio proclaimed in 1920 after consolidating his hold on Fiume. It combined ceremonial rituals, a drafted constitution inspired by his poetic and political vision, and a quasi-military government structure designed to legitimize the occupation as a sovereign experiment. The documentary recreates its founding rituals and governance symbols to show how D'Annunzio sought to turn a military seizure into a recognized polity.

The film's discussion of which archival documents to use hints early on that the Regency's elaborate self-presentation would become a central focus of the reenactments.

Rome initially tolerated the Fiume adventure because it played well with nationalist public opinion, but relations collapsed once D'Annunzio began behaving as an independent head of state rather than a loyal agent of Italy. His refusal to dissolve the Regency of Carnaro, his open defiance of parliamentary authority, and the danger that his paramilitary model would inspire copycat movements convinced the Italian government that the occupation had become a threat to its own legitimacy. The documentary portrays this standoff through reenacted negotiations and political clashes that make the contradiction visible.

The film's opening interviews already show Rijeka residents framing D'Annunzio as a disruptive figure, foreshadowing the conflict with Rome that closes the historical arc.

The occupation ended when the Italian government ordered its own military to confront D'Annunzio's irregulars in a decisive December 1920 clash, shattering his attempt to hold the city indefinitely. Outgunned and abandoned by much of his following, D'Annunzio abandoned Fiume and the Regency of Carnaro collapsed with him. The documentary treats this confrontation as the turning point that reshaped both the city and the trajectory of Italian political extremism.

Tensions shown in earlier reenacted political meetings foreshadow the inevitability of a military resolution rather than a negotiated one.

The documentary strongly implies that D'Annunzio's Fiume experiment previewed the political style Mussolini would later adopt: charismatic leadership, organized squads of followers, theatrical mass rallies, and the blurring of nationalism with paramilitarism. Many of the ritual gestures, slogans, and organizational tactics first tested in Fiume reappeared in the early Fascist movement. Rather than declaring this connection outright, the film leaves viewers to weigh whether D'Annunzio was a proto-fascist innovator or simply one of several figures whose methods fed into Mussolini's rise.

Reenactments of D'Annunzio's staged rallies echo Fascist imagery that would dominate Italy only a few years later, hinting at the continuity the film invites viewers to consider.

Director Igor Bezinović casts ordinary Rijeka residents as D'Annunzio, his soldiers, and other historical figures in order to make the past physically inhabit the present-day city. By having locals inhabit these roles, the film collapses the distance between the people who live with Fiume's legacy and the figures who shaped that legacy, turning reenactment into a form of collective memory work. The behind-the-scenes footage of auditions and rehearsals makes the constructed nature of this approach explicit, so the performances read as interpretation rather than impersonation.

The film's opening interviews, in which residents struggle to place D'Annunzio, foreshadow the decision to let those same residents literally embody him on screen.

Fiume o morte! opens and closes in present-day Rijeka, framing the historical occupation through the voices and bodies of the people who now live there. Street interviews, auditions, rehearsals, and reflections from the participants who performed in the reenactments weave the 1919–1920 events directly into the everyday texture of the modern city. This structure treats memory as a living dialogue, showing that the occupation is not a sealed chapter but an unresolved presence in Rijeka's identity.

The director's very first question to residents about D'Annunzio establishes the framing device that the closing scenes will pay off.

After the occupation ended, Fiume passed through Italian, German, and Yugoslav administrations before becoming the Croatian city of Rijeka, and each political transition reshaped which stories could be told and which were suppressed. As a result, knowledge of D'Annunzio varies sharply by generation, neighborhood, and family history, with some residents recalling vivid details while others have only vague impressions shaped by plaques or hearsay. The documentary deliberately preserves this unevenness rather than smoothing it into a single narrative.

The very first interview, in which a resident admits to knowing almost nothing about D'Annunzio, foreshadows the layered and uneven testimony the film will collect throughout.

Fiume o morte! argues that history is not a fixed record but something actively reconstructed by each generation through the stories it chooses to keep, perform, or forget. By staging reenactments, debating which sources to trust, and reflecting on the experience afterward, the residents of Rijeka become co-authors of their own past rather than passive inheritors of it. The documentary's ambiguous ending leaves the audience with the question of how any community should carry a contested legacy forward.

Early discussions among cast and crew about which archival material to include foreshadow the film's larger argument that memory itself is a curatorial act.

The documentary deliberately refuses to settle the question, presenting D'Annunzio as all three at different moments. He mobilized genuine Italian nationalist sentiment over Fiume, drafted a poetic constitution for the Regency of Carnaro that imagined a new kind of civic life, and pioneered the paramilitary aesthetics and cult of the leader that Mussolini would later weaponize. By staging these contradictions rather than resolving them, the film invites viewers to judge which version of D'Annunzio they find most persuasive.

The opening interviews, in which residents describe D'Annunzio in sharply different ways, foreshadow the unresolved interpretive tension the film sustains to its end.

After the December 1920 confrontation forced D'Annunzio out, Fiume went through years of disputed status before being assigned to Italy, then occupied during the Second World War, and finally incorporated into Yugoslavia after 1945, becoming the Croatian city of Rijeka. Each of these transitions rewrote how D'Annunzio's legacy was discussed, with successive governments erasing or reframing plaques, monuments, and street names. The documentary's return to present-day Rijeka underlines that the city's modern identity is shaped by this layered sequence of reinventions.

Shots of faded plaques and street signs in modern Rijeka foreshadow the historical layering the closing segments will explicitly trace.

Fiume was a multilingual Adriatic port with both Italian and Croatian-speaking populations, and the post-war settlements left its status deliberately ambiguous to satisfy competing Italian and Yugoslav claims. Neither the Treaty of Versailles nor subsequent negotiations produced a stable answer, which is precisely the vacuum that allowed D'Annunzio to act in September 1919. The documentary uses archival material and interviews to show how this unresolved status made the city both a prize and a flashpoint for nationalist politics.

Maps and archival documents shown early in the film foreshadow the geopolitical ambiguity that made D'Annunzio's intervention possible.