Silent Friend

In Ildikó Enyedi’s mesmerising Silent Friend, three lives are quietly shaped by encounters with a majestic ginkgo biloba tree on a university campus.

In 1908, a determined young botany student challenges the university’s barriers to women; in 1972, two students forge a charged bond over a plant experiment; and in 2020, a neuroscientist (Tony Leung) teams with a botanist (Léa Seydoux) to probe the mysteries of the ginkgo. A tender and engrossing exploration of human connections to nature.

"Strange, enrapturing, simultaneously vast and minute, Enyedi’s latest spends a lot of time considering how we perceive our surrounding flora — but just as much on how it perceives us..." — Guy Lodge, Variety