‘Asphalt Guerrilla’ Locarno Review: A Punk Essay on Cinema and Resistance

How do you make political cinema? How do you conceive it, how do you execute it, and with what resources? Asphalt Guerrilla, the new film by that restless Portuguese filmmaker Edgar Pêra, attempts to unravel these mysteries by following what appears to be an old project of the director’s: bringing to the screen a story connected to the armed groups that emerged in Portugal after the so-called Carnation Revolution, which took place on April 25, 1974, overthrowing the regime that had been in power since 1926. That film, which includes one of these improvised groups going underground and a violent bank robbery that ended very badly, was never completed in the way the director intended. And the winding road from those early attempts to the present day —recounted in a decidedly fictionalized manner— is what this sort of autobiographical film essay explores.

Asphalt Guerrilla, initially inspired at least in part by the novel of the same name by Manuel Ricardo de Sousa, opens with the bank robbery and subsequent getaway, unfolding at the frantic pace of an action film. Through the mise en abyme that defines the narrative, we soon begin to see what lies behind those images: an actor recording the voice-over accompanying the scene, multiple takes and repetitions, and, little by little, the logic of a film essay begins to emerge in full. This is not a movie about a revolutionary group that robs banks, but rather about how to make a movie about such a group while maintaining an equally disruptive spirit.

The film thus recounts, in documentary form —false at times, less so at others, mixing real archival footage, the filmmaker’s personal history and plenty of AI-generated imagery— a possible trajectory that this project has taken throughout the director’s life and career. Pêra grew up in the atmosphere of punk and has always approached cinema through a DIY aesthetic: homemade, direct, aggressive and disruptive when it comes to classical forms. For Pêra, trying to film the story of a subversive group that turns criminal and goes from being supported by the public to being attacked by it becomes a kind of curse. One way or another, his various attempts to bring the story to the screen fail. They simply don’t work.

Asphalt Guerrilla plays with fiction by incorporating other possible ways of making the film —as a comedy, through streaming platforms, with the “collaboration” of an American action-film director, or by using artificial intelligence— gradually turning the project into a journey through one impossibility after another. This trajectory also gives Pêra an opportunity to consider the role of the auteur within a commercial system: that of a filmmaker without the necessary resources, who often depends on public or private money from others to bring his more ambitious projects to life.

It is within these complicated lines of communication between art and industry, documentary and fiction, and auteur cinema and commercial filmmaking that Asphalt Guerrilla operates. At its core, it is a film about how and why political movies are made. With archival footage of Terence McKenna —the philosopher and “psychonaut” who collaborated with Pêra on several projects in the 1990s, including Manual of Evasion LX 94— the film attempts to understand itself as the continuation of an aesthetic and political quest, one that asks questions about the very nature of images and challenges the ways in which they are used. How do you make political cinema in the age of AI-generated images? The answer will probably come in a few years.