Film archive, 2025

Silent Friend

Director Ildikó ENYEDI

1Festival entries

★Avg. rating

Silent Friend is a film that perfectly encapsulates Enyedi’s quiet yet intense artistic world. Having featured whispering stars within My 20th Century (1989), she now presents a 200-year-old ginkgo tree in Silent Friend. Characters from different eras spend time in a German university’s botanical garden—the university’s first female student in 1908, a shy male student in 1972, and a neuroscientist from Hong Kong in 2020. They are quiet and patient observers, irrelevant to the flow of time. Such traits enable them to communicate with a ginkgo tree and a geranium, allowing the plants not only to watch and engage with the people but to actively respond. The way the story moves through time is much like the ginkgo tree unraveling what it has sensed and remembered. While different tones are used for each era, they are all united through the tree’s consciousness. Life is awakened by experiences that are as calm as moonlight yet not solemn, peaceful yet not boring.