A new documentary project in development by Igor Bezinović, produced by Restart (Croatia) in co-production with La Bete (France) and Nosorogi (Slovenia) won a co-production award by RE-ACT at the recently held Trieste Film Festival. The crew of the film received the award in a short ceremony organized by the workshop and market program When East Meets West.
The project was chosen among 22 other films, by the Program council of RE-ACT and two highly skilled European experts in fiction, animation and documentary film – Katerina Kaklamani and Martichka Bozhilova, winning a prize of 8.000 EURO.
RE–ACT co-development funding scheme which can support up to six projects per year is intended for feature-length fiction, documentary, animation and experimental projects, as well as short animation projects in advanced stages of development, and is aimed at filmmakers and producers from the territories of the partner funds who wish to co-develop projects together and foster closer professional ties in between Croatia, Friuli Venezia Giulia (IT) and Slovenia.
This is a documentary about an historical interlude that we might call ephemeral, but that is nonetheless important, from the point of view of the history of ideas and ideologies.
It was September 1919, when the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio entered the town of Fiume and just a year later declared the independence of a micro-nation that he baptised Italian Regency of Kvarner, and that controlled the territory of the Croatian city of Rijeka and its surroundings.
During fourteen months, D’Annunzio lived in Rijeka, called Fiume by the Italians, with a number of avant-garde artists and intellectuals that flocked there from all over Europe and some- times beyond. Among them, one could count the founder of Futurism Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the film theorist Ricciotto Canudo, or the Japanese writer Harukichi Shimoi.
What they found in Fiume, was a libertarian artistic haven. Lenin and the Berlin Dada Circle backed them, and it seemed for a moment that Fiume was the most progressive state on Earth.
This state of things lasted until 1924, when Fiume was conquered by the Italian government and fully integrated in its fascist state. Strangely enough (or not), several ideas originating from this peculiar libertarian experience were then recycled by the regime.
