London

A unique and deeply moving entry into the canon of experimental road movies, Sebastian Brameshuber’s award-winning London is a portrait of the elegant and elusive Bobby (Bobby Sommer, Museum Hours TIFF ’12). Grey-haired and at times world-weary, but always affable, he supplements the fuel costs for his trips between Vienna and Salzburg on the iconic West Autobahn by offering rides to strangers through an app.

London transforms this seemingly ordinary succession of commutes into a profound meditation on connection, movement, and the traces people leave on one another, not unlike the marks of history impressed into landscapes. Drawing inspiration in part from James Benning and Bette Gordon’s 1975 avant-garde classic The United States of America, Brameshuber foregrounds the humans whose lives we pass through as much as the places themselves.

Here the liminal zone of the car variously evolves into a confessional, a waiting room, or a refuge, where strangers — played mostly by non-professionals — meet in circumstances that are at once anonymous and intimate. They include an unsettled soldier; a woman preparing for a wedding that her parents reject; and an academic (played by filmmaker Ted Fendt) researching the highway’s Nazi past. With each new passenger, the vehicle becomes a shifting social landscape of existential colloquy, revealing lives shaped by loneliness, hope, grief, desire for freedom, and the uncertainties of the present.

Deceptively simple, richly layered, and produced with an impressive formal prowess — it was meticulously shot in-studio using vintage rear-projection techniques — London is a rare work whose structural artifice reveals the mysteries of the real.

ANDRÉA PICARD