Portuguese filmmaker Edgar Pêra premieres Locarno-bound ‘Asphalt Guerrilla,’ mixing fact, fiction and AI-themed concerns

Portuguese filmmaker Edgar Pêra is taking a new hybrid work to the Locarno film festival, where his latest feature, ‘Asphalt Guerrilla,’ will premiere, according to an interview published by The Hollywood Reporter on Aug. 8. Pêra described the project as a story about filmmaking itself, built to “hold up a mirror” to contemporary life, while also wrestling with the tools and ethical questions raised by new AI capabilities.

In conversation about the film ahead of its Locarno bow, Pêra said he is using AI as part of his creative process while simultaneously trying to respond to his own concerns about the technology. The interview frames this as an active tension rather than a rejection, with the director presenting AI as something that can be engaged with directly, even as it intensifies questions about authorship, accuracy, and control over narratives.

The director also characterized the movie as a fusion of fact and fiction, suggesting the film’s structure mirrors the way audiences encounter the modern world, where images, testimony, and interpretation can blur together. Pêra’s approach, as described by The Hollywood Reporter, ties the film’s form to its themes, using filmmaking methods as both subject matter and mechanism.

Pêra linked the film’s concerns to broader social developments, including the rise of radicalism in the world. In the interview, he described radicalization not primarily as an isolated phenomenon, but as a symptom of wider conditions that his work aims to reflect and interrogate through cinematic storytelling.

The Locarno premiere places the film within a major European festival context, where directors often use festival debuts to establish international visibility for new work. The Hollywood Reporter’s report does not describe additional programming details, awards considerations, or distribution plans beyond the Locarno premiere.

Beyond the festival timeline, the director’s remarks underscore a key part of the film’s premise: filmmaking as an act of shaping reality, and AI as a new factor that changes what that act can mean. By presenting a film that mixes invention with documentary sensibility, Pêra appears to be directing attention to how stories are constructed, verified, and experienced.

As of publication, the only publicly described details of ‘Asphalt Guerrilla’ are its hybrid fact-fiction approach and its inclusion of AI-related questions, alongside Pêra’s statement that the film is meant to reflect on radicalization as a symptom. Additional specifics such as cast, technical credits, and synopsis details were not included in the interview excerpt summarized by The Hollywood Reporter and may require further confirmation from festival materials or the film’s official communications.