A challenge met: Enyedi takes an original approach to the task of connecting human beings with the plant world.
Marcello Mastroianni Award to Luna Wedler at the 2025 Venice Film Festival
2020. A neuroscientist from Hong Kong arrives at a German university as a visiting professor. He specializes in studying the minds of infants. There, he begins an experiment involving a large tree just as Covid begins to spread.
1972. Two young students begin a relationship centered on caring for a geranium and studying how it reacts to its surroundings.
1908. At the same university, we witness the challenging admission of the first female student to the Faculty of Botany. She finds work as a photographer's assistant and discovers the full potential of the craft.
"A challenge met: Enyedi takes an original approach to the task of connecting human beings with the plant world. The undertaking of linking humans to the plant world was no simple matter, yet the Hungarian director succeeded—while also addressing the evolution of male-female relationships over time. Just as plants are distinguished by sex and react to external stimuli, so too do human beings—albeit with added complications arising from the rules society has established for itself." (Giancarlo Zappoli)
"Silent Friend connects humanity, life, and science in a small yet monumental cinematic miracle. This time, the Hungarian director has succeeded in brilliantly capturing the very essence of her form. Enyedi inevitably draws upon the legacy of 20th-century auteur cinema—Tarkovsky’s sculpting of time and nature, and the temporal and emotional alienation found in the work of Wong Kar-wai (featuring the illuminating presence of Tony Leung)—yet she transforms these influences into a surprising, original, and deeply personal vision. It is a work open to the possibilities of a new visual and humanist future, where plants are acknowledged and thanked in the closing credits as if they were characters—active agents in a magnificent, sensory film that miraculously captures the energy of living beings. The final image—the autumn-yellowed ginkgo biloba standing majestic against the frame and within 'its own' time, accompanied by Blixa Bargeld reciting Goethe once more—serves as the monolith Ildikó Enyedi has erected to the mystery of life and cinema." (Carlo Valeri)
