Sebastian Brameshuber’s meditative road movie reveals the human condition through our connections with others and our past.
Premiering at this year’s Berlinale Panorama section, Sebastian Brameshuber’s London, an outlier of the road movie genre, somberly uses the setting of the car’s interior and its distance as a space for dialogue and connection. Driving back and forth roughly 350 kilometers weekly from Salzburg to Vienna, Austria, Bobby opens his commute to strangers via rideshare app, using the carpool idea as a confined space for Bobby and his passengers to interact, reveal, and share livelihoods from a broad view. Using documentary techniques and a simplistic approach fusing fiction and non-fiction, Brameshuber invites us on a journey through a worldly perspective, a haunting past, and the universal experiences we face.
Bobby, a 72-year-old Austrian male, picks up strangers to or from Vienna/Salzburg to fill in his solitude, time, and extra cash. Brameshuber slowly reveals through conversations with his various passengers of Austrians and immigrants of Bobby’s background and purpose. As for the passengers, there is something vulnerable in using a rideshare for long drives, using the space and time for curiosity, therefore opening passages into perspectives of all kinds. The film’s minimal setting and concept is at times demanding, but with a soothing rhythm and pacing, we are intimately invited to understand the bigger picture the through compassion.
The passengers, as much as Bobby, also carry the weight of emotional backgrounds and histories. Whether it is soldier in training, where he can relate and discuss their true feelings toward the army, a passenger (an esoteric cinephile cameo by filmmaker Ted Fendt) interested in the highway and its pillars due to its development significance at the start of the Nazi occupation, or simply a Romanian woman who fled her native country to catch a bus to get to Brussels for work, these are real stories by real humans, played by actors, which I may suspect Brameshuber’s non-fiction background in discovering these stories informs the film’s concept. This hybrid approach is deceptively immersive, using its naturalism through a simple camera placement utilizing side profile reverse shots. Symbolically, the highway acts as another abstraction towards space and time, posing as a timeline of our historical and personal journeys.
But our central character, Bobby, is our guide throughout this road trip. The reason for his long drives is because of an old friend, Arthur, who is in a coma at a hospital in Salzburg. Stories of his own life are shared amongst the passengers, revealing deeper traits of his personality including shame and freedom. There’s an intense longing in his voice, a soft-spoken, yet assertive intonation which gives these conversations a gripping and calming quality. His welcoming presence, scruffy white hair, and astute listening gives us and the passengers a tender affection towards others.
The film’s title, London, the city where Bobby went to university for, is not only a formative experience for him, but also thematically shows the global aspect in a world where the pervasive chauvinism and hate is overwhelming. For a film that is dialogue driven, one of the strongest aspects is the dialogue’s tender build up, but never explicitly explained. The context behind each story during a given era infers Bobby’s predicament and relays his empathy towards others, whether they are a young worker providing for his parents, supporting a Yugoslavian queer woman, or acting as an accomplice for the benefit of others, Bobby becomes a saint-like figure.
Our team is on the ground at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival, running from February 12th to 22nd, 2026.
