“Silent Friend is just as political and as vital as the films that try to show us the horrific reality of human connection failing.”

“We’re hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it ‘reality’.” – Anil Seth, Neuroscientist

A botanical garden. A zoo for trees, of sorts. But unlike caged animals nervously walking back and forth in their fenced world, dominated by the human spectators peering into their small habitats, the trees in a botanical garden tower over us, shelter us from rain and sunshine, watch over us. They are the spectators, they perceive us at their own pace, in their own rhythms, in their own time. They see us transform, not just as individual human beings, but as societies, as a species. In Ildikó Enyedi’s humbling sensory experience Silent Friend, the trees are the symbol of this evolution but also of time at a different pace, a pace that humans need to learn to follow. Our reality is only what we as humans perceive, but we can’t think outside the box, or rather the cage, that our ‘reality’ traps us in. Silent Friend is a moment in time to contemplate a different world, different connections, a different time frame. The silent ginkgo tree at the heart of this film invites us to observe ourselves and to move at its pace, and to explore what human connection really means and how special it is when we truly find it.

Marburg, 2020. Chinese neuroscientist Tony (Tony Leung) visits the German city to give a lecture at its university about the different ways babies experience the world around them when compared to adults. He observes life at the institution through its modern glass facades, the students buzzing about like eager bees ready to suck up the nectar of knowledge, coming from every corner of the world to connect over and study a shared reality. He strolls through the lush botanical garden at the heart of the university campus, experiencing and admiring nature’s rhythms. His reality changes when COVID forces everyone to stay home. Suddenly he is forced to change pace, locked inside the campus with only the university’s concierge Fuchs (Martin Wuttke) for company. Eager to have something to do, he communicates with a French scientist (Léa Seydoux) on Zoom. She studies plant behaviour, and under her remote guidance Tony sets up an experiment to observe the changes in the electromagnetic patterns of a majestic ginkgo tree that dominates the botanical garden. Forced to lead an ascetic life akin to that of a Buddhist monk, albeit in a world of glass and concrete, Tony discovers much about himself, about the secret lives of trees, and about the connection formed by two beings – be it between himself and a grumpy concierge who only speaks German and finds Tony profoundly strange, or between humanity and the trees it takes for granted.

Marburg, 1972. Hannes (newcomer Enzo Brumm) is a self-described ‘farm boy’, a hick who came to the city to study at the local university. Coming from a world where plant life is omnipresent and often a hindrance to the humans that try to tame it, he declares that he hates plants to a girl he meets in the overgrown botanical garden. It is the time of long hair and bushy beards, and the garden reflects that, although towering over the tall and wild grasses is a majestic ginkgo tree that has seen trends and social upheaval come and go. The girl, Gundula (Marlene Burow), studies the secret lives of plants, including that of the geranium in her dorm room window. It’s spring, the time of pollination, and love is in the air. The shy Hannes and the self-assured and curious Gundula clumsily fall in love, even if they don’t know it yet; pheromones and hormones suspend time for a fleeting moment. When she leaves to discover the world during summer break, she entrusts Hannes with the care of her geranium. It is this small, pink flower that makes Hannes understand what it means to care for something and to have a connection to something new. Or someone new, with the flower being an extension of the girl.

Marburg, 1908. She may have a strong head on her shoulders, but Grete (Luna Wedler) is still nervous before her interview with the university faculty’s éminences grises to decide whether she will be admitted. The school has only just, begrudgingly, opened itself up for female students, yet it is still very much a male bastion; the interview makes that pretty clear, as one of the misogynist old grumps who test her knowledge goes a little too deep into Linnaeus’ theory about the sexuality of plants in order to embarrass her. Afterwards she strolls through the botanical garden, in touch with nature and anxiously awaiting the old men’s decision, underneath the garden’s majestic ginkgo tree. She needn’t worry: her academic takedown of the old professor has granted her acceptance into the male world of science, the first woman ever to access this hallowed place. But that doesn’t mean she is not seen as an outsider, a curiosity for the lustful eyes of its male population. When she finds lodging with an old photographer who teaches her the tricks of his craft, Grete is able to capture a single moment in time and keep it forever. In her spare time, when she’s not working on retouching the photographer’s portraits like an early 20th-century Photoshop wizard, she starts to photograph plants and discovers the universal structures of life in them. An eager female botanist is born (the 19th-century photographer and botanist Anna Atkins is an inspiration for her character).

Freely intercutting between the three storylines, often playfully done by editor Károly Szalai, an image of time slowed down starts to emerge from Silent Friend, primarily but not uniquely through the titular friend, the ginkgo tree we see grow over time. This magnificent tree witnesses humanity change, watches science evolve, but also sees the human experience slow down or entirely stop under her watch (even if her gender is initially mistaken): from Tony’s lockdown that forces him to change speed; to Hannes’ pace being dictated by the time he spends with Gundula at first, and later with her silent friend, the geranium; and finally, to Grete, literally stopping time via her photography. Each story is also a chance to examine human connection, through Tony and his concierge frenemy, through Hannes and Gundula, and through Grete and her supervisor Thomas (Johannes Hegemann), who may want to get under her skirts as much as the rest of the student body, but who at least treats her like an equal (Linnaeus’ descriptions of polyamory among plants, a subject the old professor gleefully brings up during Grete’s interview, finds resonance in the ways Grete is ogled by her fellow students).

Enyedi diligently crafts Silent Friend around the different time periods. From a 35mm black-and-white image capturing Grete’s world to a saturated, grainy 16mm stock evoking the ’70s in Hannes’ timeframe, and finally shooting digital to nail the straight, cold lines of modernity in Tony’s 21st-century environment, the director effectively creates a sense of epic scope. Yet through the reappearance of the tree, she establishes that despite the major upheavals human society has gone through in the century this film spans, the world around us actually hasn’t changed much. We’re just not looking. With Silent Friend Enyedi gives us the second film this year that uses the concept of objects which exist on a different time scale being witness to our society changing while the world stays put; Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling used a farmhouse that sees generations of a family die and be born again. But Enyedi goes deeper and turns nature into an actual character, through the ginkgo tree but also expanding to the natural world in general, even if it is the artificial world of a botanical garden. Countless shots are dominated by trees, their branches framing the characters, at times almost obscuring them, which can be interpreted in a threatening, encroaching manner, as if to swallow up the people it has caught in its branches, or seen as a protective embrace that holds the warmth and love of a mother. Luscious macro photography shows us the miracle of life through the eyes of a plant: timelapse images of germinating pods and seeds are covered in deep greens against pitch-black backgrounds, allowing us to fully focus on the beauty of life being created. That majestic ginkgo tree also once started its life in humble beginnings like this, hundreds of years ago.

To talk about performances in a film like this is a bit of a fool’s errand, certainly when the real protagonist is a tree. But Leung, Wedler, and Brumm all give affecting, deeply felt performances, while also being allowed moments of levity. With the heady, cerebral subject matter and such an unusual approach, it is surprising just how funny the film can be from time to time, and part of that lies in the comedic abilities of the cast (shout-out to Martin Wuttke, whose nosy concierge who slowly warms up to this stranger in his ‘house’ is given some truly hilarious moments of silent comedy that his facial expressions punctuate perfectly). Some of these interactions are so unexpected for the type of film that Silent Friend is, that when a beautiful fox shows up you half expect it to crow “Chaos reigns!”. But Enyedi lets nature be nature, and captures the simplicity and wonder of its symbiosis, from little critters climbing up a tree (a humorous juxtaposition with Hannes’ semi-successful attempts to do the same) to a badger finding a place of shelter for the night in a tree hollow. It is a perfect illustration of how we are the outsiders, the ones that at best take nature for granted, and at worst cut it down.

The beauty of Silent Friend, no matter how ‘alien’ the concept might seem on the surface, lies in showing that plants have their own mysterious ways of perceiving, their ‘Umwelt’. We may not understand it, limited by our narrow definitions of reality and communication and connection, and thinking that our way is the only way, but plants have a life of their own. We can’t grasp it, but we are just as unlikely to grasp the ways of intelligent alien life if we ever encounter it. Through computer imaging Enyedi shows us the root system of the tree, which resembles the synapses of a neural network. Are they the ‘brain’ of the tree, is that where they store their ‘memories’? Seydoux’s and Leung’s research in the film is certainly not fictional, although it is a field of science that is only half a century old, lagging way behind Linnaeus’ work. In other words, we are still finding our footing in the field, and it would be silly to outright dismiss it just because we don’t understand it. In a time when science is under attack, it is vital to have a film which unabashedly advocates for scientific research into trying to understand how the complex system of the natural world around us works. A film which stresses that only by understanding our own Umwelt will we be capable of fully grasping our place in the world, and hopefully which teaches us some dignity and respect for our environment. Silent Friend does this through showing the beauty of that environment and asks us to, like the film’s protagonists, humble ourselves in the face of nature’s grandeur. It is a majestic achievement that towers over the small world of cinema the way the ginkgo tree does over humanity in the film; at a festival where politics has, rightfully, taken its place in the spotlight, Silent Friend is just as political and as vital as the films that try to show us the horrific reality of human connection failing.