Ildikó Enyedi’s Silent Friend is one of the best films of the year.
Discover one film you didn’t know you needed:
Not in the zeitgeist. Not pushed by streamers.
But still easy to find — and worth sitting with.
And a guide to help you do just that.
Having won multiple awards at Venice, including the FIPRESCI and the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actor, this ambitious, thought-provoking film does not disappoint. Set across three different timelines (1908, 1972, 2020), each shot with different technology (35 mm, 16 mm, and digital), Silent Friend tracks the lives of three people who attend a university and become enamoured with plant life on or off campus — the titular silent friend(s).
While the plants and buildings remain, the cast of characters change over the years, but all share a desire for connection — and a sense of being an outsider. Whether that’s the first woman admitted to a science program at the university in 1908, a Professor from China, or a quiet boy who can’t quite get up the nerve to tell his roommate how he feels about her. The trees witness these events, but also play a key role in the connections the people we watch make.
Supported by the Sloan Science Foundation (a sure sign that there will be woo-woo science in the film, and boy is there), the film is nevertheless brimming with ideas about human isolation and connection, the human fascination with trees and using science to understand the mysteries of the world, and how, as the saying goes, the more things change, the more they remain the same. (Sad to say, not a whole lot has changed in academia for women.) The film earns its lengthy 2.5 hour runtime and breezes by surprisingly quickly.ause. But with a two-hour runtime, this begins to feel shaggy, and takes us away from what made the film most powerful: how it connects the museum archive to Veda’s artistic practice, showing not just a campaign for repatriation, but an artist actively grappling with how to make the violence of colonial display visible to contemporary audiences.
Silent Friend is now screening at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.
Discover one film you didn’t know you needed: an Indigenous film about colonial injustice
Not in the zeitgeist. Not pushed by streamers.
But still easy to find — and worth sitting with.
And a guide to help you do just that.
