Fiume O Morte!

It concerns the Croatian city of Rijeka, which rests on the Italian border and has been known by many names — and belonged to nearly as many different countries — throughout its long history. The most turbulent chapter began after World War I, during which time streets, schools, and hotels of what was then Fiume were renamed in honor of Gabriele D’Annunzio, an Italian poet and playwright turned fascist military leader who occupied the city for 16 months beginning in 1919. “My Italian colleagues warned me not to mention fascism too much in the intro for the sake of Italian viewers,” narrates the filmmaker early on, “so I’ll stop here.” Except he doesn't, really.

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Directed by Croatian helmer Igor Bezinović and taking its title from D’Annunzio’s slogan, which translates to “Fiume or death!,” Fiume O Morte! is a documentary about, among other things, the process of making a documentary. After asking dozens of residents whether they’ve heard of D’Annunzio, most of whom haven’t, Bezinović does what any enterprising documentarian would: stages a reenactment of Fiume’s occupation starring hundreds of those same residents. Some are cast because they’re bald, as D’Annunzio was, while others are picked because they can pass as soldiers or speak a nearly extinct dialect of Italian called Fiumano. The result is self-consciously absurd yet startlingly authentic, which might be the best — and certainly most honest — way to portray fascism.

The title card appears 30 minutes in, by which time the film has already announced itself in other, more important ways. Louder, too: A heavy, guitar-heavy soundtrack accompanies archival footage of D’Annunzio and his goons taking to the streets before Bezinović switches to scenes from those same streets featuring his sprawling cast of first-timers. The novelty of these reenactments, some of which are of still photos, simply never wears off, as Bezinović stages them so cleverly that each one is like a self-contained tableaux.

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At times this is reminiscent of The Act of Killing, in which filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer invited the unpunished perpetrators of the Indonesian genocide to reenact their own crimes with jaw-dropping results. Bezinović is interested not in persuading murderers to realize the depths of their depravity but in pointing out that the ridiculous and the repugnant often go hand in hand. He plays with aspect ratios and production design to make his recreations as era-appropriate as possible, often in a way that draws attention to the filmmaking without distracting from the story being told. If it sometimes seems like Bezinović is flexing his cinematic muscles purely for the sake of doing so, it’s hard to blame him — his abilities are estimable, and the subtle ways in which Fiume O Morte! is as much about filmmaking as it is about Fiume only deepen the links between past, present, and portrayal.

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In reconstructing these events through his own idiosyncratic lens, Bezinović is showing the power of such narratives to shape our understanding of history. Should we believe his version at the expense of all others? It’s possible he’d prefer that we don’t, instead seeking out other sources that complement and perhaps even contradict his telling, lest we accept any one version of a chapter of history without an appropriately large grain of salt.

The result is self-consciously absurd yet startlingly authentic, which might be the best — and certainly most honest — way to portray fascism.

Several actors play D’Annunzio, just as several narrate the film. The military leader was as pleased with himself as he was out of his depth, a vainglorious dilettante with little interest in, or aptitude for, actual governance. (Any similarity to actual persons or events is unintentional, as they say.) He occupied the city of his own volition, as Italy itself didn’t sanction the move, but did have an early admirer in none other than Benito Mussolini. Il Duce had apparently soured on D’Annunzio by the time he described him as a “rotten tooth” that had to be “either pulled out or covered in gold.” No matter: D’Annunzio had already laid the blueprint for far worse atrocities to follow. He died in 1938, scarcely a year and a half before World War II broke out, and hasn’t been entirely forgotten — though they don’t build monuments of him in Rijeka, one recently went up in the nearby Italian city of Trieste.

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Fiume O Morte! was recently named the year’s best documentary at the European Film Awards, an honor that’s difficult to begrudge. This is propulsive, kinetic nonfiction filmmaking of a rare sort, with Bezinović showing that the past isn’t just prologue, nor is it another country. It’s a never-ending thread that can be tugged in either direction but never fully grasped, even and especially by those wise enough to fear what happens when we fail to heed the lessons that some in power would prefer we forget.