It takes an hour for us to see the protagonist in all of its glory for the first time in Ildikó Enyedi’s SILENT FRIEND: an over 200 year old ginkgo tree in the botanical garden of Marburg University that is so big that it can only be captured with a tremendous camera tracking shot. Until then, you only see parts of it but it is still the indisputable center of the film.

The episodes that are split into three different era are anchored by it, and the director makes the importance of the tree clear from the very beginning by staging it like a protagonist, not like a scenic background. Exploratory tracking shots let the highly individually formed branches seem like facial features, there’s a wealth of close up of its leaves and the patterns of its bark, and classic over-the-shoulder shots of its gnarled branches. The encounters with the tree is crucial for all of its human co-protagonists.

In the spring of 2020, shortly before the Covid pandemic, neuroscientist Professor Wong (Tony Leung Chiu-wai in his first role in a European arthouse film) travels to Marburg from Hong Kong. But lockdown leads to the cancellation of his planned lectures. Practically alone at the empty campus, he begins to get interested in communicating with the ginkgo tree.

In the year 1908, the university allows women to attend for the first time. Grete (Luna Wedler) applies for biology and has to take an entrance exam that could also work as a 10 minute short film: the way the chairman (Rainer Bock) tries to humiliate the young woman with sexualized questions is a textbook example of structural sexism. But Grete's thoughts have long since transcended the moral barriers of her time. She responds as a scientist and is accepted.

In the 1970s, Marburg is a sought after place of refuge for German philology student Hannes (Enzo Brumm) after a childhood in the country. He isn’t interested in plants until his roommate introduces him to an experiment she is conducting with a geranium: using sensors that record all the plant's movements, she wants to make its language understandable to humans and prove that plants feel and communicate in a very similar way to us.

Enyedi loosely connects the story but while watching the conceptual connections between the eras reveal themselves bit by bit. Inspired by online exchanges with a colleague, Wong begins an experiment that tries to decode the the ginkgo tree and make it understandable for people. Gundula’s geranium experiment seems like a direct predecessor of this thesis, and the photography which Grete learns in the pioneer stage is the necessary first step for the imaging techniques used by neuroscience in the 21st century.

The radical approach that connects Enyedi’s researchers is their questioning of human superiority over plants. All of them ask whether we are more similar to the trees or potted plants than we think. From the perspective of this film, the human ability to feel, express, and make decisions aren’t more than arguments. This type of perception and thinking had enemies in every era: the leftist machos in the 70s are the direct descendants of the sexist exam board of 1908, and Professor Wong also experiences how his experiments seem threatening to some.

Susanne Stern

Translation: Elinor Lewy