★★★★☆
At the heart of the botanical garden in the medieval university town of Marburg stands a Ginkgo biloba tree, ancient and patient, watching a century of lives pass beneath its branches. Across three stories set in 1908, 1972 and 2020, Silent Friend follows those who cross paths with it, their lives quietly altered by the presence of the tree and the world of nature surrounding them.
Ildikó Enyedi presents the film as a meditation on the unseen connections between people and the natural world. The ginkgo stands not simply as a tree but as a witness, enduring while generations arrive and disappear. Her storytelling drifts between the poetic and the philosophical, allowing the audience to consider a form of connection that exists beyond speech, beyond the boundaries of time.
Winner of the FIPRESCI Prize and the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actor (Luna Wedler) at the 2025 Venice Film Festival, the film places human lives within the wider systems of nature. The intertwined roots and reaching branches of the garden form their own quiet network, a living structure of symbiosis and survival that continues beneath the surface of the human world.
The film visualises this connection through moments of illumination, representing brain and glowing plant activity. The throbbing pulses of light on the computer screen, the light inside the tree radiating its aura to those all who share beneath it.
The branches and root systems are like strands of brain nerves. The connected, intertwining systems of the trees and plants in the garden of the university are a symbolic symbiosis of thriving nature.
The score is pure sci-fi, droning and hovering notes of questioning and observing of phenomenon, arisen of witnessing the aurora-borealis-like light show of brain activity and internal tree activity. Low hovering tones drift through scenes like signals being transmitted as if listening for something hidden.
All four characters are observers of their world in the grasp of understanding it, and in reality, in search of connection. They all share in the forms of isolation.
Grete (Luna Wedler), a woman in a world of men. Hannes (Enzo Brumm) is in a complex world of academia, but also the complexities of love and relationships. Tony (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) is in a pure world of isolation due to COVID restrictions. The Ginkgo biloba is only at the heart of Tony’s story yet is a silent observer to all. All three gain connection and transformation from the nature around them.
Seamlessly, we transition between the time periods. 1908 is in clear black and white. 1972 has a bright almost grainy effect similar to films of that era. Enriching the connection between plant and human, human and human, are the contrasting close-ups of faces speaking. But they are also reacting to what is said.
The camerawork hovers, acting as the silent watcher (friend). It is not menacing, but often simply an observer in silent awe. We peek behind the branches and beside the trunk and from the roots. But it is those who are watching as well as us.
Gergely Pálos’s beautiful cinematography uses the surrounding plant life to mirror and intensify the characters’ emotional states. Close-ups of blossoms and exposed stamens echo Grete’s simmering frustration with misogyny. Hannes’ uneasy coming-of-age is reflected in thorns and jagged growths, nature at once reaching outward and defending itself. Tony, meanwhile, is framed against barren winter branches, the stripped bark and stark lines underscoring his isolation.
In Silent Friend, Nature does not simply sit behind the human story. It watches, it waits. It listens. Beneath the quiet soil of the garden runs a living network, roots touching roots, life communicating in ways unseen. Something is shared there, something ancient and patient, a language still beyond our understanding.
Silent Friend runs 9 – 15 March as part of Lotterywest Films and Perth Festival. Somerville Auditorium, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Hwy, Godroo / Crawley WA 6009.
Tickets: https://www.perthfestival.com.au/program/season-2026/silent-friend
Website: https://www.perthfestival.com.au/program/season-2026/lotterywest-films
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/perthfest/ and https://www.instagram.com/lotterywest/
Watch the trailer:
Film details:
Title: Silent Friend
Director: Ildikó Enyedi
Cast: Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Luna Wedler, Enzo Brumm, Léa Seydoux
Country of Origin: Germany, Hungary, France
Duration: 147 mins
Rating: M
Silent Friend is also running at ACMI Melbourne on 6 March.
