The film opening Doclisboa was built from archive, fiction and AI
Edgar Pêra's Guerrilha no Asfalto works from the testimony of a former FP-25 operative. The festival's 24th edition runs in Lisbon from 15 to 25 October, and the first Portuguese titles are out, including a portrait of the fado singer Carminho.
This year’s Doclisboa opens with a film that starts in a book and ends somewhere between the archive and the machine. Guerrilha no Asfalto, by Edgar Pêra, has been named opening film of the festival’s 24th edition, which runs from 15 to 25 October. It grows out of Manuel Ricardo Sousa’s book of the same name and sets the account of a former FP-25 operative against the director’s own memories of the 1980s, weaving together archive footage, fiction and artificial intelligence.
For anyone unfamiliar, FP-25 was the armed group behind a string of bombings and killings in Portugal in the early years after the dictatorship fell. It remains one of the least settled chapters of the democracy, and Pêra has never been a maker of tidy reconstructions.
Which Portuguese films are confirmed so far?
The announcement comes ahead of the Portuguese Competition and fills out two strands. In From the Earth to the Moon are Amílcar, by Miguel Eek, approaching the independence leader Amílcar Cabral through his own writing, letters and archives; Casa do Artista, Não é Permitido Envelhecer, by Solveig Nordlund, filmed in the daily life of the Casa do Artista; and Our Last Film about Lisbon, by the Left Hand Rotation collective. Alongside them sit Nosso Segredo, by Grace Passô, a Portuguese-Brazilian co-production about a grieving family, and Vestígios, by Luís Mendonça, which sets photographs by judicial police specialists against a hunt for a forgotten film noir.
The same strand brings back Ala-Arriba!, by José Leitão de Barros, in a new copy digitised and restored by the Portuguese Cinematheque, in the year marking 130 years since the director’s birth.
Music runs the Heart Beat strand. Esta Vida de Marinheiro, by Paulo Miguel Antunes, follows the late musician João Aguardela; Nha Balila, Dentu d Algem, by Inês T. Alves and André Xina, stays with a living legend of Cape Verdean batuku; and Neste Quarto, by Ana Rocha de Sousa, travels through Japan with fado and the voice of Carminho. Literature and philosophy arrive through Margarida Gil’s O Filme do Meio and Edmundo Cordeiro’s Carta a José Bragança de Miranda.
Worth putting in the diary?
If documentary is your thing, yes, and early. The first wave of highlights already carried Juliette Binoche’s debut as a director and films featuring Kate Bush, Elza Soares, Salman Rushdie and Slavoj Zizek, and the festival has also announced a retrospective devoted to the Filipino director Lino Brocka. With more than two hundred films across eleven days, weekend screenings go first.
If you are following Portuguese cinema abroad, it has been a full month: we wrote a few days ago about the Venice prizewinner with Portuguese co-production and cinematography by Leonor Teles.
Image: Doclisboa / Guerrilha no Asfalto (2026)
