Silent Friend

Varya: “My most anticipated film of last year about human interaction with a female ginkgo biloba tree.”

Three eras: 1908, 1972, and 2020. Into the silence of a botanical garden come different people: the first female student of Marburg University, a student hopelessly in love with his classmate, and a neurobiologist trapped on campus during the COVID lockdowns. Each brings their own feelings, thoughts, and inner state to the ancient tree.

Director Ildikó Enyedi: “The complexity of interconnectedness is our main theme. For different reasons, all of our human characters are outsiders, and I myself am also an outsider in this wonderful place [the Marburg Botanical Garden]… So we needed to find an outsider tree. I managed to find the perfect actor: a tree whose flowers bloom only at night and are pollinated by bats. But it turned out that the northernmost place where this tree grows is Portugal! So we had to give up and continue searching. Ginkgo was perhaps an even more radical solution. These trees miraculously survived extinction millions of years ago.”

🏆 Winner of the FIPRESCI Prize at the Venice Film Festival.