The plant world lights up alongside Tony Leung Chiu-Wai and Léa Seydoux in this playful, eccentric love letter to scientific experimentation and the beauty of noticing life in all things.
The message that Silent Friend, in its passionately compassionate way, means to leave us with is: consider your plants.
Silent Friend 2025
In the botanical garden of an old university town in Germany, and at the heart of celebrated director Ildikó Enyedi’s sprawling meditation on a world that is mysterious and sensitive enough to stun anyone paying attention, a gargantuan gingko tree stands for more than a century. It is the subtle constant and quiet connector between scientific seekers from three different times.
In 1908, the first woman to get past an admissions process rigged in men’s favour explores the radical and sensual possibilities of plants and avant-garde photography. In 1972, a lovestruck student encounters a surprising spark of communication when his crush enlists him to supervise her geranium experiment. In 2020 (a strand star-powered by Tony Leung Chiu-Wai and Léa Seydoux), a visiting neuroscience professor stuck on a campus in pandemic lockdown is eyed with suspicion as he immerses himself in the hallucinogenic possibilities of life across species. Over a decades-long career, Enyedi has brought her wild and peculiar eye to European arthouse cinema, opening up the strangeness in everyday existence and dream layers that are often hiding in plain sight.
- Carmen Gray