Silent Friend

Ildikó Enyedi, whose On Body and Soul won the Golden Bear at the 2017 Berlinale and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best International Feature Film, returns with a century-spanning triptych that moves from 1908 to the early months of the pandemic, unfolding around an ancient ginkgo in the botanical garden of Marburg University, the fixed witness to a century’s worth of passing faces. From a young woman forcing her way into the male-dominated scientific establishment at the dawn of the 20th century (played by Luna Wedler, winner of the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actress at the 2025 Venice Film Festival), to idealistic lovers in the politically turbulent 1970s, Enyedi considers how consciousness itself is historically situated, mapping the incremental rewiring of how people think and connect over time. Tony Leung anchors the 2020 chapter with a characteristically subtle, deeply felt performance as a visiting neuroscientist stranded on campus during lockdown, whose attempt to measure the tree’s electromagnetic signals—guided remotely by a French plant biologist, played by Léa Seydoux—gradually opens into a meditation on perception itself. Shifting between silvered monochrome 35mm, warm 16mm, and digital macro-photography, Silent Friend attends to the rhythms of time in all its forms, where the tremor of a leaf in late afternoon carries the same gravity as a held glance across a room. A 1-2 Special release.