The following is a short interview with Guerrilla Metropolitana, a cult director of underground extreme films. He is known for Dariuss (2023), which shocked its niche audience, and now The Benefactress (an exposure of cinematic freedom), a new controversial work that continues to push the boundaries of provocative filmmaking that has nary a care for rules.

As I occasionally research and study cult films, this opportunity to interview Metropolitana came out of the blue and piqued my curiosity. Suffice to say, The Benefactress is purely for the extreme arthouse crowd, as transgressive and morally dubious a work as any. You’ve been forewarned!

I proposed four questions, just to keep myself at arm’s length from the film, but more importantly, to attempt to understand WHY anyone would make a film like this.

Q1: Most would consider your work to be a low-budget indie extreme exploitation film with a small cast and crew, and shot in a single location. Would you still have made the film in a similar way (e.g. similar content, similar aesthetics, etc.) if there had been no anonymous sponsor, or if it had been a different ‘type’ of sponsor?

GM: Mine is an artistic choice. Not a circumstantial one. I wanted to make a profoundly underground film but with a unique quality, using the language of meta-cinema and featuring a small cast of strong and courageous actresses. The film cost around $10,000. We shot the film over a weekend in a rented house on the outskirts of London without telling the owner how we would use it. Despite having a draft board I had prepared months in advance, I ultimately decided to improvise almost all the material, precisely to capture the most absolute realism and wildest spontaneity. The two main actresses, JUICY X and MYSTERY WOMAN, were able to give such impactful performances precisely because they didn’t know what I would shoot scene by scene. It was the fruit of vision and improvisation. The strength of this film lies in its underground naturalness, therefore unconventional and totally against every traditional rule of cinema.

Q2: As far as extreme cinema goes, your film is certainly transgressive in every sense of the word and may be argued to fall even beyond the notion of ‘cult film’, as cultish viewing habits also imply a sense of community or following. What kinds of followings do you think your film will garner, or what kinds of audiences do you hope to attract?

Technically speaking, The Benefactress (an exposure of cinematic freedom) is an experimental film. It’s strongly arthouse with pornographic overtones and is extreme in its cinematic quality. But it’s not horror, nor is it literally porn. Although the film was initially rejected by many arthouse cinemas due to its graphic content, it has nevertheless managed to circulate in many film clubs in America and Europe with public screenings. Some of these film clubs are organized by film academics who have recognized the film’s unique quality. This film is attracting a lot of attention from a fan base more inclined towards extreme arthouse cinema than typical horror. American company ‘Blood Pact Films’ had the balls to buy it and internationally distribute it on DVD and Blu-ray (the film is also on streaming), and they are doing an excellent job.

Q3: Cinema is often a marker, expression or negotiation of power (e.g. dominance, submission, politics, etc.). What are your thoughts on your film’s relationship with power? Why mark, express or negotiate power with such transgressive content?

I am not a liberal. On the contrary, I am a right-wing individual with a strong hatred for political correctness and the entire nauseating woke culture with its dictated values of inclusivity, equality, and harmlessness. I am a wild sexual animal who shits on these values. I believe in the strongest, in talent, and in the exclusivity of the gifted individual. I despise mediocrity, superficiality, and progressive liberal hypocrisy. I am a rebel who refuses to bow before the podium of equality. This film is the most supreme expression of this rebellion, where the filmmaker’s vision comes before everything and everyone. The Benefactress (an exposure of cinematic freedom) is a cry for power, prevarication, domination, and artistic license against all bourgeois morality and against every code of what is permitted.

Q4: Cinema is also about the pleasures of viewing (scopophilia/gaze, performance/the performative, aesthetics/style, sound, etc.). I couldn’t locate specifically the pleasures of viewing, partly due to its content, and partly due to the style employed (e.g. excessive close-ups, shaky camera) which made me physiologically nauseous. What are your thoughts on your film’s relationship with pleasure, or lack thereof? 

The Benefactress (an exposure of cinematic freedom) is not a film to be enjoyed. That’s not the goal. Not to please the viewer, but to engage them in what is a wild and realistic experience of underground cinema. Some of the sexual scenes are real. This is not a film that caresses with formality or conventional rules through a common narrative form or a classical exposition. This is a film that vomits on everything that classical cinema offers. It is an expression of visionary brutality where authenticity, wildness, and artistic-intellectual honesty reign supreme. I didn’t make this film to soften people up, but to transport them to an unprecedented cinematic experience through the lens of realism and meta-cinema. It is a type of art completely naked, pure, honest, and uncontaminated by the hypocrisy of today’s cultural and artistic conformism in general.