Silent Friend

From award-winning Hungarian director Ildikó Enyed comes a genre-defying film that explores the subversion of human supremacy and the depths hidden beneath convention. The consciousness of an ancient Gingko tree presides over three braided stories, all set within the same university botanical garden in a medieval German town. Silent Friend follows a female graduate student fighting the constrictions of academic misogyny in 1908, a shy student in the 70s learning to listen beyond social expectations, and a modern-day neuroscientist (the luminous Tony Leung Chiu-wai) cracking the veneer of separation between human perception and plant consciousness. Fueled by an evocative, ethereal soundtrack and spare, masterful cinematography, the film sings through its depiction of direct perception unmoored by the construct of time. The rewards are deep for those who sit back into this cinema experience, which asks an essential question for our time: when there is no shared language, how do we make ourselves truly known, to each other?