Bimmer

Introduced by author Keith Gessen 

Dir. Pyotr Buslov. 2003. 110 mins. Digital projection. In Russian with English subtitles. With Maxim Konovalov, Sergei Gorobchenko, Vladimir Vdovichenko, Andrei Merzlikin, Ljudmila Polyakova. This story of four rough-hewn, unrepentant hustlers and their escalating adventures in a stolen BMW (bimmer, pronounced beemer, is slang for the car) became an out-of-nowhere cultural sensation in Russia and beyond, unearthing a new generation of filmmakers fed on 90s western genre films and formed by post-Soviet madness. Infectiously scored and expressionistically filmed, Bimmer is a darkly funny road trip through an immoral, socially arbitrary landscape, featuring four antiheroes who careen between profane nihilism and tribalist loyalty, and an ending that echoes The Wild Bunch in its cinematic spectacle and generational reckoning.

Keith Gessen is a founding editor of n+1 and a contributor to The New Yorker and The London Review of Books. He is the editor of three nonfiction books and the translator or co-translator, from Russian, of a collection of short stories, a book of poems, and a work of oral history. He is also the author of two novels, “All the Sad Young Literary Men,” and “A Terrible Country,” which will be released on July 10, 2018 by Penguin Random House.

Tickets: $15 ($11 seniors and students / $9 youth (ages 3–17) / free for children under 3 and Museum members at the Film Lover and Kids Premium levels and above). Order tickets online. (Members may contact [email protected] with questions regarding online reservations.)

Ticket purchase includes same-day admission to the Museum (see gallery hours). View the Museum’s ticketing policy here. For more information on membership and to join online, visit our membership page.