This intriguing documentary from Croatian film-maker Igor Bezinović is partly a comic opera and partly a chilling message from the past. It is about Bezinović’s home town of Rijeka, a port on the Adriatic which after the first world war was the site of one of the 20th century’s strangest episodes, whose key moments the director stages through re-enactments with local people. The film is in effect a protofascist Passport to Pimlico.
In 1918, this city, with its significant ethnic Italian population, was known as Fiume and was formerly ruled by the recently destroyed Habsburgs. After the war it was not absorbed into the victorious Italian nation as many expected but left under the control of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (whose name was later changed to Yugoslavia). Enraged by this betrayal, hothead Italian aristocrat, poet and cocaine addict Gabriele D’Annunzio led a bizarre insurgency with 186 mercenaries or “legionaries”, with whom he carried out a sub-Napoleonic landing in Fiume and established it as a kind of pro-Italian city state under his absolute control.
