Edgar Pêra's 'Asphalt Guerrilla' Uses AI Imagery to Blur Fact and Fiction at Locarno 2025

Portuguese auteur Edgar Pêra premieres 'Asphalt Guerrilla' (Guerrilha no Asfalto) Out of Competition at the 79th Locarno Film Festival, blending documentary history, fiction, and deliberately deployed AI-generated images. The film revisits Portugal's radical FP-25 armed organization of the 1980s — drawing from a book by former member Manuel Ricardo de Sousa — while simultaneously serving as a meta-commentary on guerrilla filmmaking itself. Pêra co-wrote the screenplay with Rodrigo Areias, with cinematography by Jorge Quintela and editing by João Mora.

Pêra describes the film as a mirror of contemporary society's inability to distinguish real from fabricated, a concern he links directly to AI's role in manufacturing false imagery and news. Rather than hiding his use of AI-generated visuals, he embeds deliberate clues within the film, turning the technology's tendency to blur reality into both a formal device and a critique. "This fusion, or blur, of fiction and reality is something that I like, but it's also something that I must fight against," he told THR.