Edgar Pêra Brings Asphalt Guerrilla to Oldenburg
Portuguese director Edgar Pêra has returned to the Oldenburg Film Festival with 'Asphalt Guerrilla', a restless mix of fiction, documentary and AI sequences.
He discussed the film in an interview published on 17 September by The Hollywood Reporter, which traces his long connection to the German event. The conversation puts the new feature at the centre.
'Asphalt Guerrilla' looks back at FP-25, the failed Portuguese revolutionary group of the 1980s, and asks how art can work as resistance. It is built as a film essay and manifesto, meaning a personal argument made on screen rather than a straight drama. The festival describes it in plainer terms as a fictional film with a real background, set in a utopian phase of Portuguese democracy, according to Filmfest Oldenburg. Producer Bando à Parte lists it as a feature fiction film from Portugal directed by Pêra.
Oldenburg audiences will know the name. Pêra's 2018 feature 'Magnetick Pathways' screened there, followed by 'The Nothingness Club' in 2023, about Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, and the AI-created 'Telepathic Letters' in 2024, as detailed in The Hollywood Reporter. The interview presents those three titles as part of his Oldenburg history. That record gives regulars a clear thread to follow into the new film.
He also took part in 'One-Way Ticket to the Other Side', an anthology, meaning a collection of shorts by different directors made for the same project. The budget was €100 ($110). Each short started from a track by Belgian duo Pornographie Exclusive, giving every film-maker the same musical spark and very little money.
Pêra joined forces with festival director Torsten Neumann to direct the festival trailer, titled 'The Great Disillusionment'. It uses AI and computer-generated effects to place H.G. Wells' 'The War of the Worlds' in Oldenburg, complete with retro UFOs hovering over the town. For anyone new to festivals, the trailer is the short teaser that plays before films to give the event its own identity.
Organisers bill the 2026 gathering as the 33rd Internationales Filmfest Oldenburg. What makes this stand out is the contrast in scale. One project is built for €100. Another imagines a full alien invasion over a small German city. Both land on the same festival programme.
