Silent Friend

Ildikó Enyedi won the Golden Bear in 2017 with On Body and Soul and returned to the Venice competition in 2025 with a German-French-Hungarian production organised around a tree. Silent Friend took the FIPRESCI prize and the Marcello Mastroianni Award for the young Swiss actor Luna Wedler.

The ginkgo stands in the botanical garden of a German university, and the film visits it in three eras: a contemporary neurobiologist from Hong Kong researching whether plants perceive; a student in 1972 caught between the era's politics and an unspoken attachment; and, in 1908, a woman attempting to study at an institution that will not admit her. Tony Leung Chiu-wai appears in the modern strand. The connective tissue is the tree, filmed in time-lapse, macro and infrared, and the argument is that attention is a form of relation.

Enyedi's films have always been about the difficulty of registering another consciousness — human, animal, now vegetable — and reviewers at Venice found this the fullest statement of that project. At 147 minutes it asks for patience, and unlike most films that make that request it is genuinely gentle about it.