Silent Friend

Silent Friend asks you to watch a tree. Specifically a ginkgo on a German university campus in Marburg, which Ildikó Enyedi follows across three eras, 1908, 1972, and 2020, as the humans around it fall in and out of love and mostly fail to notice the oldest living thing in the courtyard. Enyedi made the wonderful On Body and Soul, and she has the same patient, slightly mystical eye here. Tony Leung anchors the modern section.

This is slow cinema, and it wants you to actually slow down with it, so it won’t be for everyone and it doesn’t pretend to be. But if you meet it where it lives, it’s a quietly radical little film about time, and about how much happens while we’re not looking. The kind of thing you keep thinking about days later.

A single ginkgo tree on a German university campus in Marburg quietly witnesses three loosely connected human stories across 1908, 1972, and 2020, including a Hong Kong neuroscientist who turns to botany during lockdown.