Bold opening: Car sharing isn’t just about saving gas—it becomes a lens on contemporary Europe, a moving portrait of strangers forging connection on the road. But here’s where it gets controversial: can a single journey really reveal an entire continent’s modern truth? Now you’ll see how London, the new film from Austrian director Brameshuber, answers that question.
The Berlin premiere of London marks Brameshuber’s latest exploration after Movements of a Nearby Mountain and And There We Are, in the Middle. Described as neither documentary nor pure fiction, the film crafts a hybrid space that mirrors real conversations while bending toward a cinematic study of today’s Europe.
In the story, Bobby Sommer stars as a driver who spends his days cruising the highway linking Vienna and Salzburg. Through a car‑sharing arrangement, he collects travelers who share the route and the goal of saving on fuel. The cast is a microcosm of social variety: a young man grappling with mandatory military service, a queer woman on the verge of marriage, a supermarket trainee, and an academic investigating the highway’s history.
Square Eyes handles world sales for the project, produced by PanamaFilm’s David Bohun and Lixi Frank, with a Berlin premiere slated for Monday, February 16.
Brameshuber’s approach was practical and imaginative: he placed Sommer in a studio with a rotating group of young performers, simulating long road trips to cultivate free-flowing dialogue. Sommer sometimes received direction through an earpiece to steer conversations toward relevant topics.
The director’s core aim is explicit: to examine this particular form of encounter between strangers. Through a tapestry of conversations, London builds a portrait of present‑day Europe and highlights its overarching themes.
Bobby’s backstory—his youth, his parents, his thoughts on aging, and a friend in a Salzburg coma who motivates all his drives—becomes the emotional throughline that binds the vignettes together.
Brameshuber has practical reasons for centering car sharing. He himself used the Vienna–Berlin route by car with strangers, a choice that produced rich, evolving conversations. “You mostly look straight ahead while talking to the person next to you, so eye contact is limited,” he explains. That dynamic, he notes, creates a distinct atmosphere that fascinated him enough to translate it into a film.
The road itself, with the passing landscape, becomes a character—an atmosphere that pulls travelers into a shared experience. This, the director felt, was a story worth telling.
How Sommer came to the project is a small tale of discovery. Brameshuber first saw him in a film and then met him in person while the director needed someone to record a poem for a short project. The resemblance to a character from Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop inspired Brameshuber, who sent the film to Sommer—who hadn’t yet seen it—and sparked a dialogue that would evolve over roughly twelve years toward the film’s eventual release.
Casting focused on finding young people who were open to sharing personal stories while keeping an element of mystery—enough to feel authentic and engaging without tipping into cliché.
The Westautobahn (A1 motorway) appears on screen as a route with a historically charged past. Brameshuber notes that the sequence of views along this highway was designed to reflect—and critique—the Nazi-era effort to craft a picturesque corridor. He’s drawn to places that bear historical density, and the Westautobahn provides a perfect example of a landscape whose backstory is largely hidden beneath the surface—bridges and viaducts from that period still carry fragments of that history as part of the road’s infrastructure.
Originally, the film carried the working title In Current Traffic, a nod to the digital age’s trip estimates—Google Maps and similar tools that gauge travel time in real time. The title London emerged closer to completion when Brameshuber felt the word captured more than a city name; it pointed to a mental geography tied to Bobby’s memories of youth—the music, the sense of freedom, the feeling of being unbound.
In Brameshuber’s view, the title should not be an enigma but a poetic association that broadens the film’s space beyond the car to a broader sense of destination and emotion.
Would you like this rewritten version polished to a punchier, more opinionated editorial style or kept as a descriptive, journalistic rewrite?
