Silent Friend
Drama • Documentary • 2025 • 2h 27m
Stille Freundin
This movie was screened on 82. Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica 2025
A layered narrative that unfolds across three different eras: 1908, 1972, and 2020. At the center of it all, an ancient ginkgo tree, millennia-old and silent, observes, accompanies, and—delicately yet incisively—transforms. Here, natural memory becomes an unexpected guest, a presence that asks for no permission, yet inhabits human space with the enigmatic discretion of a stranger.
“Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.”
— Rabindranath Tagore
An aesthetic vision of time and interspecies connection: divided into stylistically distinct chapters. Black-and-white images, shot on film, accompany young Grete in 1908; 1972 is captured on 16mm film filled with warm yet faded colors; finally, in 2020, sharp and cold digital formats dominate. This aesthetic choice is not mere visual affectation, but a sensory expression of inner worlds and temporal relations. Editing thus becomes an exercise in hospitality between different times, letting another time enter without reducing it to identity.
In each era, contact with the ginkgo becomes a silent ritual, an experiment in listening that transcends words and seeks a non-anthropocentric reciprocity. It is not about understanding the other, but about opening oneself to its silent call; the tree is never an object, but a tacit companion. Here one senses an echo of Derrida’s lesson: true hospitality does not consist in reducing the guest to our language, but in allowing them to remain irreducibly other.
The film embodies a philosophy grounded in bodies and perceptions; it explores the concept of Umwelt—the subjective world of each species—evoking Thomas Nagel’s reflections on the mystery of “what it is like to be another.” Silent Friend avoids interpreting nature, preferring instead to show its presence as an open sensory field, without closure. In this suspended space, what is familiar becomes strange, and what is strange becomes familiar: the gap of otherness, which Derrida would call the “coming of the other,” is the very condition of experience.
Every protagonist is an outsider: Grete, the only woman in a male university; Hannes, a country youth in a restless context; Tony, a neuroscientist from Hong Kong isolated on a post-lockdown campus; and the ginkgo, finally, a solitary presence in an exotic garden. Strangeness becomes a threshold and a possibility of observation, not identification. Thus, hospitality toward the other is never possession, but a fragile openness to that which unsettles.
Science listens and the body tells the story: Enyedi proposes a science that is not detached, but embodied, sensitive, almost empathetic—what Goethe called a “tender empiricism” (Zarte Empirie). Knowledge is not domination, but participation: an act of coexistence, not possession. Here science bends like a language that welcomes without appropriating, reminding us that all authentic knowledge must be able to be contaminated by what it cannot fully grasp.
The body—not only the mind—becomes an instrument of perception. Small gestures, hesitations, nonverbal proximity become vehicles of a communication that transcends words. It is a language that welcomes the other without erasing them, just as hospitality remains forever unfinished.
The film’s narrative architecture is silent and open to questions: a modular scaffolding. Episodes coexist rather than follow one another, weaving an open, fragmented discourse instead of presenting a completed thesis. The silence evoked in the title is not absence, but a space of listening, a place to linger rather than explain. It is a space akin to that undefined threshold between host and stranger, where identity cracks open to possibility.
The plant, both symbol and subject across the segments, embodies biological time, cultural memory, resistance, and otherness: it is female, millennial, different.
In a single living image, the film’s meaning is concentrated. The ginkgo never allows itself to be fully assimilated: like Derrida’s irreducible guest, it remains elsewhere, obliging us to rethink our boundaries.
Silent Friend is a visual poem that deconstructs the boundaries between human and nature, human time and biological time. Enyedi orchestrates a silent dialogue between bodies, eras, and different life forms, using photography, film matter, and minimal gestures as language. It is a contemplative and critical invitation: to remain, to observe, to perceive the other without seeking to normalize it. And, in filigree, an exercise in radical hospitality: to welcome what disarms us—the silent friend that dwells within us and does not belong to us.
“It is the language of nature one must learn to listen to.”
— Vincent Van Gogh
This movie was in the official competition of 82nd Venice International Film Festival 2025
