A film centers on a massive ginkgo biloba tree on a German university campus, marked by a plaque dating it to at least 1832. Three separate stories unfold across different time periods but remain connected through the same place and shared themes. The central idea suggests plants might have forms of perception, communication, and even consciousness that humans have not fully grasped. The narrative includes a neurology lecturer studying how babies perceive the world through brain patterns, later shifting to research involving the tree during a COVID shutdown. Other timelines follow a woman admitted to study botany after misogynistic questioning and a student involved in radical politics and experiments with a geranium.
"Silent Friend centers on an enormous ginkgo biloba tree that has been growing on the campus of the University of Marburg in Germany since at least 1832, the date embossed on a plaque embedded in its trunk. Enyedi uses it as a fulcrum around which three separate stories wind, each separated by time but connected by place and theme. That theme, though ultimately ineffable, has to do with the idea or possibility that plants have aspects of perception, communication, and even consciousness that we have collectively barely begun to fathom."
"Tony Leung plays an academic from Hong Kong visiting Marburg as a lecturer in neurology. Specifically, he has been studying the brain patterns of babies when presented with various stimuli and what that tells us about how they see the world. Turns out this is all happening in 2020, and when the COVID pandemic shuts down the university and strands Leung in Germany on its abandoned campus, he embarks on another research project involving that majestic tree."
"Meanwhile, in the late 19th century, a young woman named Greta (Luna Wedler) has applied to the university, enduring an unsurprisingly but infuriatingly misogynistic interrogation by the admissions board before being reluctantly allowed inside the ivory tower to study botany. And in the heady 1970s, a student, Hannes (Enzo Brumm), becomes embroiled in both radical politics and a relationship with a young woman performing experiments on a geranium."
#nature-and-ecology #plants-and-consciousness #film-narrative-structure #neuroscience-and-perception #covid-19
Read at Oregon ArtsWatch * Arts & Culture News
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