London

Bobby Sommer is at the wheel of Sebastian Brameshuber’s enthralling car film, a familiar face to anyone who has attended the Viennale, where he has long been driving guests from one venue to another. He reprises that role after a fashion in LONDON, which sees him drive back and forth along the West Autobahn, picking up passengers along the way to cover his petrol costs. Across the resultant chain of encounters, he reveals fragments of a past that is never quite resolved: some invented, some true, and some in- between, like his job as a guard at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which echoes his role in Jem Cohen’s MUSEUM HOURS (2012). But Bobby is above all a listener, taking in the many stories of those beside him: a young soldier, a Ukrainian psychology student, a Nigerian mechanic, a queer activist, a Marxist cinephile and an academic interested in the history of bridges and highways, allowing the road’s Nazi past to gradually resurface. Moving between reality and fiction, Brameshuber heightens the viewer’s attention through a dispositif akin to Abbas Kiarostami and James Benning, conveying the time and structures that shape (a) life with unusual clarity. (Antoine Thirion)

In the presence of Sebastian Brameshuber and Bobby Sommer.

Sebastian Brameshuber: MUEZZIN (2009), UND IN DER MITTE, DA SIND WIR (2014), OF STAINS, SCRAP & TIRES (2014, K), IN, OVER & OUT (2015, K), BEWEGUNGEN EINES NAHEN BERGS (2019)