Silent Friend

In the botanical garden of an old German university town stands a large ginkgo tree. The film tells three separate periods that gather around it. In 1908 one of the university's first women students is admitted to the botany department and meets resistance from her professors and her classmates alike. In 1972, in the middle of the counterculture, a shy student becomes fixed on his housemate and on the plant she is working with. In 2020, during the pandemic, a neuroscientist from Hong Kong asks a well-known botanist for help with an experiment on the old tree. Ildikó Enyedi's film competed at Venice and came away with two prizes. Tony Leung and Léa Seydoux are in the cast. What connects the three stories is not an event but a way of looking: the idea that plants might have their own kind of attention and their own kind of time. It runs a hundred and forty-seven minutes and is in no hurry at all.