Fiume o morte!

The film hands the 1919 occupation of Fiume to the people who live in the city now. Hundreds of Rijeka locals, recruited through newspaper notices and street interviews, wear the costumes of legionnaires and townspeople and act it out. Bezinovic cuts these anachronistic tableaux against archive photographs and period film, so it keeps slipping between 1919 and the streets that still carry its traces.

At Rotterdam the Tiger jury described a playful, mischievous film that holds a mirror to the present. Writing for Cineuropa, Marko Stojiljkovic read it as a slick reminder that a country's darker past is never far from the surface, while Modern Times Review noted the crowd-sourced, carnivalesque method behind the reconstruction.

For a clinician, the film sits close to the psychology of the charismatic leader and the group around him. D'Annunzio rules by spectacle, oratory and uniform, and ordinary people take up his followers' identifications as readily as their costumes. Freud's account of the group bound by a shared tie to its leader finds a literal setting, and the film asks what it means for a city to hold that enactment in memory for a century.