Silent Friend

The Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi is among the most singular voices in European auteur cinema. In films like “My Twentieth Century” and “On Body and Soul” she has always joined the everyday to the supernatural. Her new film “Silent Friend”, which screened in competition in Venice, won Luna Wedler the Mastroianni Award as best young discovery and became a critics’ favourite, widens that poetic universe — and reflects on our experience of the pandemic at the same time.

Three timelines run through the film, connected by the setting of the university campus in Marburg. Tony Leung plays a professor of neurology from Hong Kong, stranded in Marburg during the first lockdown — isolated between an empty lecture hall, locked laboratories and the watchfulness of a suspicious security guard. A century earlier, Grete (Luna Wedler) becomes the first woman to enter the university and holds her own in a male-dominated academy. And in 1972 a student, Hannes, builds an intimate connection with a geranium. Through all these loosely joined, botanical-metaphysical stories, Enyedi explores shifts in perception: loneliness, the loss of routine, a different way of seeing. She is not after a naive humanising of nature but an invitation to take it seriously as a counterpart. “Silent Friend” is a hopeful film, because it dreams of a world that does not end and perish but unfolds and grows — like the massive ginkgo tree in the garden of the university of Marburg.

Shown at the 2025 edition of Around the World in 14 Films, Berlin.

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