With Silent Friend, presented at the Cairo International Film Festival in November, Ildikó Enyedi once again indulges in sensitive cinema, one that is open to formal experimentation and narrative fragmentation. A contemplative and political film that questions how we inhabit the world and listen to its silences.
Winner of the Golden Bear at the 2017 Berlinale with On Body and Soul, Ildikó Enyedi—whose work was honored with a special award (the FIPRESCI 100 Lifetime Achievement Award) at the 46th Cairo International Film Festival—returns with Silent Friend (Stille Freundin), a comprehensive work that traverses time, emotions and life itself. Seen through the prism of a majestic tree, a ginkgo tree planted in the early 20th century in a German botanical garden, the film boldly borrows the tree’s gaze. In 1908, Grete, a young woman who’s passionate about botany, tries to exist in a scientific environment that refuses to see her as anything other than an anomaly. The focus then shifts to Hannes, a student in search of guidance in the 1970s; he discovers both love and the secret language of plants during a period marked by emancipation and a desire for harmony with living things. Finally, in 2020, Tony, a solitary scientist from Hong Kong, seeks to establish a form of communication with the same tree amid the pandemic, as if contemporary science, saturated with data, were desperately trying to reconnect with nature.
Rather than linking these three trajectories in a classic plot, Ildikó Enyedi prefers to bring them together through sensations, motifs, and resonances. The different eras we’re invited to explore are distinguished by their visual and auditory textures, but are intertwined in their shared attention to gestures, silences, and glances. The ginkgo tree, motionless yet vibrant, becomes the repository of these fragmentary existences, transforming human time into a fragile and fleeting matter. Silent Friend never seeks to demonstrate, let alone explain. It observes, accompanies, and suggests. In this cinema of deliberate slowness, the viewer is invited to adapt to a different rhythm, to accept waiting and uncertainty. By shifting her gaze, and ours, the Hungarian filmmaker creates a deeply political film that avoids a programmatic approach. Silent Friend is an ode to listening, to patience, and to the possibility of a tenuous link between humans and the living world.
Laura Pertuy
© FIPRESCI 2025