Fiume o Morte! Review: A Historical Reenactment of Rare Wit and Energy

Those Who Seek to Resist the Rot: Igor Bezinović's Fiume o Morte!

While easy to forget given its catastrophic success, fascism came into the world a mess. The writer and public intellectual Umberto Eco wrote in a 1995 essay that the ideology’s original Italian form, under which he spent much of his childhood, had “no special philosophy.” This, Eco contests in Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking [...] The post Those Who Seek to Resist the Rot: Igor Bezinović’s Fiume o Morte! appeared first on In Review On…

Fiume o Morte! Review: A Historical Reenactment of Rare Wit and Energy

Note: This review was originally published as part of our 2025 IFFR coverage. The film opens in theaters on April 10. Learning about Gabriele D’Annunzio’s 16-month occupation of Fiume, a tale vividly retold in Igor Bezinović’s new, Tiger Award-winning documentary Fiume o Morte!, I spared a thought for Yukio Mishima. D’Annunzio’s life didn’t end so theatrically, but the two men––celebrated writers and hyper-nationalists with hubristic military d…