Fiume o morte! Takes the Tiger

In his third feature, Bezinović’s focus is on a particularly ludicrous but also foreboding chapter in the history of his hometown. With the Austro-Hungarian Empire disintegrating after the First World War, the leaders redrawing the maps of Europe and parts of Asia at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 couldn’t decide whether to hand the city to the Croats or the Italians. Before an agreement could be reached, Gabriele D’Annunzio, the celebrated poet, aristocrat, and Royal Italian Army officer, rode into the city he called Fiume with 186 grenadiers, a force that swelled to 2,500 troops within days.

D’Annunzio demanded that Italy annex Fiume, but the war-weary government instead set up a blockade. D’Annunzio’s response was to declare an independent, protofascist state, the Italian Regency of Carnaro, with himself as Duce. Mussolini was taking notes. Talking to the Hollywood Reporter’s Georg Szalai, Bezinović notes that the entire adventure, which lasted a little over a year before Italian troops and warships put an end to it, was later denounced as “a narcissistic escapade” by Pier Paolo Pasolini.

“So he says that it was like a clownery,” says Bezinović. “D’Annunzio is a dictator, but you realize that he’s a weird dictator. He’s like Joker from Batman. He’s this kind of a villain who you know is super intelligent and he’s super funny and witty, but at the same time you’re really afraid of him.”

In Screen, Wendy Ide calls Fiume o morte! “a gloriously punk spin on the historical documentary genre,” recreating the occupation “in all its surreal detail with the participation of some three hundred or so present-day citizens of the city. It helps that D’Annunzio was impossibly vain and traveled with his own team of photographers and filmmakers, who captured over ten thousand images of his ill-considered campaign.”

Bezinović “has raided this astonishing trove,” writes Carmen Gray at Film Verdict, “and combined archival stills and footage with paintings, postcards, performed reenactments, vox-pop streets interviews, and recited texts. He impressively wrangles a dizzying array of material and formats into an intriguing and more or less chronological retelling that thrives on wry-humored quirk and eccentric incident without losing sober sight of the deeper political questions of unmandated governance and civic resistance at play.”

The year’s Tiger Competition Jury was made up of Yuki Aditya, Winnie Lau, Peter Strickland, and Andrea Luka Zimmerman. Soheila Golestani, who plays the wife and mother in Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, was supposed to have been there, too, but Iranian authorities refused to allow her to leave the country. As the festival opened, Rotterdam director Vanja Kaludjercic said that she and her team were “saddened but not surprised.”

Special Jury Awards went to Sammy Baloji’s The Tree of Authenticity and Tim Ellrich’s In My Parents’ House. At Film Verdict, Adham Youssef calls Tree “a deeply poetic documentary weaving its cinematic narrative together through history [and] ecology and interrogating Belgian colonialism in the Democratic Republic of Congo.” House is “an intimate family drama about the strain the act of caregiving can impose on all involved,” writes Marc van de Klashorst for the International Cinephile Society.

Aiming to bridge “the gap between popular, classic, and arthouse cinema,” Rotterdam’s Big Screen Competition was launched in 2013, and this year’s winner is Jon Blåhed’s Raptures. “Focused on a principled Christian woman in a remote northern village in 1930s Sweden, losing grip on her marriage and her social standing as her husband becomes an abusive cult guru,” writes Guy Lodge in Variety, “Blåhed’s script was inspired by the Korpela movement that spun off from a particularly pietistic branch of Lutheranism in the 1920s, eventually devolving into misogynistic hedonism—facts to which the film adheres with minimal luridness . . . If the film’s serene handsomeness sometimes seems at odds with the ugly misdeeds and confused spiritual turmoil of its characters, it’s easy to argue that’s by design, reflective of how the stately exterior aesthetics and rituals of many a church can lure in new, insecure congregants.”