EXCLUSIVE: Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi’s Silent Friend closes the Venice Film Festival competition on Friday evening as the last 2025 Golden Lion contender to be unveiled this edition.
Deadline can reveal the official trailer for the long-awaited feature revolving around an ancient ginkgo tree situated in the heart of a botanical garden in a medieval university town in Germany.
The tree is the silent friend of the title having stood in the spot for over a century bearing witness to countless lives played out around it.
The film focuses on three people with a connection to the tree, living in different eras.
Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Chiu-wai plays a visiting neuroscientist in 2020, whose specialization is the minds of babies, but who starts an unexpected experiment with the old tree.
German actor Enzo Hermann Brumm plays a young student, who in 1972 is profoundly changed by the simple act of observing and connecting with a geranium.
The third story is set in 1908, and features Swiss actress Luna Wedler as the the university’s first female student who discovers, through the lens of photography, sacred patterns of the universe hidden within the humblest of plants.
The film also unites Enyedi with Léa Seydoux, star of her 2021 Cannes Palme d’Or contender The Story of My Wife, who makes a special appearance as a plant communication specialist.
“These three different moments, chosen from the last roughly hundred years show how much and how quickly our seemingly unshaken solid sense of reality transforms,” says Enyedi in her director’s notes.
“It is not just defined by our senses, it is also a cultural construct and as such, it is quite ephemeral. Our human heroes walk the same paths of the same garden, enter the buildings of the same campus but each perceive a different world. When they try to connect with the ginkgo tree, with the plants around them, they discover not only the plants but also themselves.”
Enyedi was previously in competition in Venice some 30 years ago with Magic Hunter. It was her second feature after My Twentieth Century, which won the Caméra d’Or for best first film in Cannes in 1989. In between times, she has also enjoyed success with Our Body and Soul, which won the Golden Bear in Berlin in 2017.
Silent Friend is lead produced by Germany’s Pandora Film in co-production with Galatée Films and Inforg-M&M Film in co-production with Rediance, ZDF/ARTE, ARTE France CINÉMA and Allons Voir.
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