Beautiful, elusive and peppered with provocative nuggets about the nature of life and our place in it, Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi’s Silent Friend is the Venice Film Festival’s parting gift to all those who have lasted the distance. Festival press shorthand has dubbed it “the tree film” — its central motif is a magnificent gingko tree, while its primary setting is the botanical garden surrounding Marburg’s university – but this falls so far short of what it is that it’s a kind of in-joke. This is a film about science, but it is told as poetry.

Gingko trees are either male or female. As a female with no corresponding male to help it bear fruit, this lush queen of the garden is an arboreal metaphor for the film’s human characters, who can talk about trees but not about their own lo

See Full Page