Guerrilla Metropolitana is a London-based Italian experimental filmmaker best known for his two films DARIUSS (2023) and THE BENEFACTRESS (An Exposure of Cinematic Freedom) (2025). Both films have been the subject of debate and controversy due to their themes and extreme graphic content.

EARLY LIFE

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Born in the province of Milan, he moved to Rome at the age of nine with his mother after his parents' separation. As a child, he showed an interest in music, cinema, and drawing. He spent two years at a prestigious Catholic boarding school in the Vatican, where he developed an early interest in the drums. He later began playing in rock (and later experimental) bands on the Roman underground circuit. It was during this period that he began shooting his first homemade horror shorts with a video camera with a friend. He studied art and became interested in eroticism. A few years later, he decided to leave for London to start his underground band, Monoxide (some of whose music was later used in his films). During this time, he worked as a male escort for wealthy clients.

EARLY WORKS

After several years as a semi-professional musician and suffering from severe psychological and substance abuse issues, he had to stop and subsequently quit music. Years later, in 2021, he decided to embark on a new artistic journey and explored experimental cinema.
A few months later, he shot the short horror film BITS (filmed entirely secretly without permission inside an apartment building on the outskirts of London, with an actress he had met the day before, risking arrest for trespassing). He subsequently shot two more short horror films, MY SPECIAL SUPERHERO - A Visual Subtext of Madness and Rejection and THE BARON AND THE HARPSICHORD), followed by a medium-length horror film about British censorship and the elite, THE CENSOR - A British Horror Tale of Real Politics and Social-Moral Code.

DARIUSS

In 2023, Guerrilla Metropolitana completed his debut feature film, DARIUSS, which immediately catapulted into the international underground scene with the American distribution company SRS Cinema (later also available on streaming). The film chronicled how a family in Essex, England, experiences trauma and loss after the death of their young daughter and how each member of the family copes with this grief. The film, shot with highly experimental techniques, contained scenes of rape, necrophilia, incest, masturbation, disembowelment, and pedophilic perversion. It was noted by several prominent film critics, writers, and film blogs and immediately divided public opinion between those who praised it as a visionary work of art and those who deemed it inconsistent due to its highly disturbing narrative abstraction. The film was later distributed in Europe by Ultra Visual Films and received mixed reviews due to its strong experimental and extreme nature. Among those who praised the film were Canadian-Italian film lecturer Donato Totaro (owner of the online film journal OFF SCREEN), notable American horror critic Meredith J. Brown of Dread Central, Italian writer and author of many books on cinema Gordiano Lupi, and others, including multiple film blogs. To this day, the film attracts diverse opinions and is highly polarizing.

THE BENEFACTRESS (An Exposure of Cinematic Freedom)

In 2025, after shooting a short horror film titled CORPORATE TORMENT - It Burns Like Hell (rejected by all the festivals it was submitted to due to some highly pornographic scenes, including one showing a deformed baby sodomizing the middle-aged female protagonist), Metropolitana completed his second feature film, THE BENEFACTRESS (An Exposure of Cinematic Freedom). After several rejections from several horror distribution companies, the film was finally accepted by the American company Blood Pact Films, which quickly distributed it globally on physical media and streaming. The film proved even more polarizing than its predecessor and attracted the attention of many critics and film publications, but it infuriated more traditional fans of mainstream horror. The film dealt with how Metropolitana himself received funding for his film from a wealthy and ill wife of a televangelist, on the condition that she too be allowed to view the footage shot on video. The film shows how the female protagonist relentlessly rapes and abuses a middle-aged woman who is held captive and indescribably humiliated until the director Metropolitana himself begins to abuse her as well in order to achieve artistic purity and cinematic realism.
The film was praised by many reviewers and extreme arthouse cinephiles for its highly experimental approach and realism (there are some scenes of actual penetration, oral sex, erections, and even ejaculation), but was heavily criticized by others, accusing it of being merely a shock value film without any commentary. The film remains controversial to this day, and despite being rejected by arthouse cinemas, it was nevertheless publicly screened by many film clubs specializing in extreme arthouse cinema in America and Europe.

STYLE AND CONTROVERSY

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The films of Guerrilla Metropolitana are characterized by the absence of dialogue, frequent and frantic handheld camerawork, sound design with dissonant music and sounds, visual performances, extreme sexual graphic violence, real sex, visual subliminal messages, guerrilla filmmaking (shooting without permits and without a crew), elaborate editing, and unconventional social themes. Both films continue to be popular among cinephiles of extreme experimental cinema but have been heavily criticized by traditional horror circles.

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PRESENT

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Although Metropolitana had a third film ready, he abruptly retired from the public eye to devote himself privately to experimenting with tribal percussion, photography, and the study of right-wing philosophers and thinkers. His figure remains among the most controversial and debated figures in modern underground cinema.

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