“The setting was very strict, because we were within the studio,” explains Sebastian Brameshuber. “But this strict set-up led to this freedom for a way the conversations could flow.”
We’re discussing London, the brand new film from the Austrian director of Movements of a Nearby Mountain and And There We Are, within the Middle, which is able to world premiere within the Panorama program of the Berlin International Film Festival. It’s described as “neither a documentary nor entirely fiction.”
The film features Bobby Sommer as Bobby, who’s at all times on the road, driving up and down a highway that links the Austrian cities of Vienna and Salzburg. Via a car-sharing service, he picks up other people who find themselves seeking to travel the identical route while saving money on petrol, including a young man battling the country’s mandatory military service, a queer woman who’s about to get married, a supermarket trainee, and an educational exploring the history of the highway.
Square Eyes is handling world sales for the movie from Panama Film producers David Bohun and Lixi Frank that debuts at Berlin on Monday, Feb. 16.
Brameshuber picked and solid people and put them in a automotive with Sommer in a studio to mimic the experience of long rides and permit for free-flowing conversations to develop, sometimes giving Sommer pointers, via an earpiece, about questions and topics to pursue.
“An important thing for me was making this film about this particular type of encounter between strangers,” the director explains. Through this collection of interactions, the movie creates “a portrait of today’s Europe,” highlights a synopsis.
And audiences discover more about Bobby, his youth, his parents, his tackle aging, and his friend in a coma in Salzburg, who’s the explanation for all his automotive trips.
The rationale for automotive sharing to be the central concept that London is built around is the proven fact that Brameshuber himself used this kind of travel for normal trips between Vienna and Berlin previously. “Traveling in a automotive with anyone who’s a stranger for an extended distance and spending a variety of time together produces a certain quality of conversation and a certain atmosphere that I discovered super interesting,” he tells THR. “You’re mostly looking straight ahead, while making conversation with the person sitting next to you, so that you don’t take a look at the person, or at the very least only occasionally.”
‘London’
Courtesy of Panama Film
Shares Brameshuber: “The road is coming towards you, the landscape is passing by; you’re efficiently moving towards a destination while just sitting there relaxed. This experience drags you right into a certain atmosphere. And I ended up feeling that I would love to make a movie about this.”
Brameshuber shares how Sommer ended up within the film. He had seen him in a movie and met him in person because he needed anyone to record a poem for a brief film. “I discovered he had a resemblance to GTO, the character Warren Oates plays in [Monte Hellman’s 1971 film] Two-Lane Blacktop,” the director recalls. “And I actually liked the scenes in that film where GTO is largely traveling with different passengers and reinventing his story for every passenger. So I sent Bobby the film because he hadn’t seen it. And from there, the dialogue with Bobby began. Nevertheless it took us mainly near 12 years for the film to come back out.”
The remainder of the casting process focused on finding “young individuals who were engaging in conversations, willing to share quite a bit about their lives, but at the identical time keeping a little bit of a mystery,” explains Brameshuber.
The A1 motorway, also generally known as the Westautobahn, that audiences see within the film has an advanced and dark history. “The sequence of views along this motorway was designed by the Nazis to create a picturesque route, which may be very interesting to me, since it links back to my previous projects about historically charged locations,” Brameshuber tells THR. “I’m at all times enthusiastic about places that carry history inside them, and for the Westautobahn, that’s very true.”
He adds: “Actually, it’s a past that’s not very visible since it’s mostly under the motorway – bridges and viaducts from that period that carry parts of the Westautobahn to this present day. As for the landscape views, you don’t necessarily consider them as a design; you only take them as a given.”
‘London’
Courtesy of Panama Film
The working title for London was actually In Current Traffic for a really very long time. That was a nod to the digital age, explains Brameshuber. “It was because Google Maps, or perhaps another navigation system on the time, had these estimates for trips: 13 hours until the destination in current traffic.”
How did the film find yourself with the title London? Brameshuber says he often changes his titles when he nears ending projects and feels what title is smart. “The title isn’t alleged to be an enigma; it pertains to the film in a more associative, poetic way,” he highlights. “London got here up because, initially, Bobby mentions it because the place he went to as a young man – for the music, for the spirit, for being free.”
Concludes the director: “For me, the title opens up the narrow space of the automotive to a mental geography and to a destination that’s more of a sense.”