{"id":299395,"date":"2026-02-15T13:31:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-15T13:31:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/299395\/"},"modified":"2026-02-15T13:31:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-15T13:31:08","slug":"in-london-car-sharing-is-caring-berlin-2026-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/299395\/","title":{"rendered":"In ‘London,’ Car-Sharing Is Caring: Berlin 2026 Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\t\u201cThe setting was very strict, because we were in the studio,\u201d explains Sebastian Brameshuber<\/a>. \u201cBut this strict set-up brought about this freedom for how the conversations could flow.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWe are discussing London, the new film<\/a> from the Austrian director\u00a0of Movements of a Nearby Mountain and And There We Are, in the Middle, which will world premiere in the Panorama program<\/a> of the\u00a0Berlin International Film Festival<\/a>. It is described as \u201cneither a documentary nor entirely fiction.\u201d<\/p>\n

The film features Bobby Sommer as Bobby, who is always 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 are looking to travel the same route while saving money on petrol, including a young man struggling with the country\u2019s mandatory military service, a queer woman who is about to get married, a supermarket trainee, and an academic exploring the history of the highway. <\/p>\n

\n\tSquare Eyes is handling world sales for the movie from\u00a0Panama\u00a0Film<\/a>\u00a0producers\u00a0David Bohun and Lixi Frank<\/a>\u00a0that\u00a0debuts at Berlin on Monday, Feb. 16.<\/p>\n

\n\tBrameshuber picked and cast people and put them in a car with Sommer in a studio to imitate the experience of long rides and allow for free-flowing conversations to develop, sometimes giving Sommer pointers, via an earpiece, about questions and topics to pursue. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe most important thing for me was making this film about this particular form of encounter between strangers,\u201d the director explains. Through this collection of interactions, the movie creates \u201ca portrait of today\u2019s Europe,\u201d highlights a synopsis.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd audiences find out more about Bobby, his youth, his parents, his take on aging, and his friend in a coma in Salzburg, who is the reason for all his car trips.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe reason for car sharing to be the central concept that London is built around is the fact that Brameshuber himself used this form of travel for regular trips between Vienna and Berlin in the past. \u201cTraveling in a car with somebody who is a stranger for a long distance and spending a lot of time together produces a certain quality of conversation and a certain atmosphere that I found super interesting,\u201d he tells THR. \u201cYou\u2019re mostly looking straight ahead, while making conversation with the person sitting next to you, so you don\u2019t look at the person, or at least only occasionally.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\u2018London\u2019 <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Panama Film<\/p>\n

\n\tShares Brameshuber: \u201cThe road is coming towards you, the landscape is passing by; you\u2019re efficiently moving towards a destination\u00a0while\u00a0just\u00a0sitting there relaxed.\u00a0This experience drags you into a certain atmosphere.\u202fAnd I ended up feeling that I would like to make a film about this.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBrameshuber shares how Sommer ended up in the film. He had seen him in a movie and met him in person because he needed somebody to record a poem for a short film. \u201cI found he had a resemblance to GTO, the character Warren Oates plays in [Monte Hellman\u2019s 1971 film] Two-Lane Blacktop,\u201d the director recalls. \u201cAnd I really liked the scenes in that film where GTO is basically traveling with different passengers and reinventing his story for each passenger. So I sent Bobby the film because he hadn\u2019t seen it. And from there, the dialogue with Bobby started. But it took us basically close to 12 years for the film to come out.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe rest of the casting process focused on finding \u201cyoung people who were engaging in conversations, willing to share a lot about their lives, but at the same time keeping a bit of a mystery,\u201d explains Brameshuber.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe A1 motorway, also known as the Westautobahn, that audiences see in the film has a complicated and dark history. \u201cThe\u202fsequence of views\u202falong this motorway was designed\u00a0by the Nazis to create a picturesque route, which is very interesting to me, because it links back to my previous projects about historically charged\u00a0locations,\u201d\u00a0Brameshuber\u00a0tells\u202fTHR. \u201cI\u2019m always interested in\u00a0places\u00a0that carry\u00a0history within\u00a0them, and for the\u00a0Westautobahn, that\u2019s very true.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHe adds: \u201cActually, it\u2019s a past that\u2019s not very visible because it\u2019s mostly under the motorway \u2013 bridges and viaducts\u00a0from that period\u00a0that carry parts of the Westautobahn\u202fto this day. As for the landscape views, you don\u2019t necessarily think of them as a design; you just take them as a given.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\u2018London\u2019 <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Panama Film<\/p>\n

\n\tThe working title for London was actually In Current Traffic for a very long time. That was a nod to the digital age, explains Brameshuber. \u201cIt was because Google Maps, or maybe some other navigation system at the time, had these estimates for trips: 13 hours until the destination in current traffic.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHow did the film end up with the title London? Brameshuber says he often changes his titles when he nears finishing projects and feels what title makes sense. \u201cThe title is not supposed to be an enigma; it relates to the film in a more associative, poetic way,\u201d he highlights.\u00a0\u201cLondon\u202fcame up because, first of all, Bobby mentions it\u00a0as the place he went to as a young man \u2013 for the music, for the spirit, for being free.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Concludes the director:\u00a0\u201cFor me, the title opens up the narrow space of the car to a mental geography and to a destination that\u2019s more of a feeling.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThe setting was very strict, because we were in the studio,\u201d explains Sebastian Brameshuber. \u201cBut this strict set-up…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":299396,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[132852,28158,139246,93,61,1042,60,270],"class_list":{"0":"post-299395","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-berlin-2026","9":"tag-berlin-film-festival","10":"tag-berlinale","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-international","14":"tag-ireland","15":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299395\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/299396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}