Tonight, at home, in front of the screen. A man in his sixties climbs a stepladder in a botanical garden, pushes a branch aside, and clips a small metal clamp onto a ginkgo leaf. The cable runs back down along the trunk. For any viewer, it is a strange image. For me, it is a gesture I have made hundreds of times, on Danaé, on the Catalpa, on the Fern, and I did not expect at all to find it there, in close-up, performed by Tony Leung.

The film is called Silent Friend, it is by Ildikó Enyedi, it runs two hours and twenty-seven minutes, and it is very beautiful. I say this straight away because it is the first thing I wanted to say once the credits had rolled.

One tree, three periods, a single garden

Everything happens in Marburg, an old German university town, in the botanical garden, around a ginkgo biloba that the film dates to 1832. The tree does not move. It is the humans who file past it, across three periods, and the tree is the main character.

1908. Grete is one of the very first women students admitted to the university. The professors set about humiliating her during the entrance examinations, her landlord throws her out for immorality, she ends up as a photographer’s assistant, then asks to sign on as a photographer on an expedition to the East Indies. This episode is shot on 35 mm black and white.

1972. Hannes lives in a shared house near the campus. His neighbour Gundula works on interactions between plants and humans, which he starts out by looking down on. Then she leaves on a trip, and he finds himself alone with a geranium wired to a sensor in the empty room. He grows attached to it. He ends up rigging the setup so that the plant controls the opening of the gate. Episode shot on 16 mm.

2020. Doctor Tony Wong, a neurologist from Hong Kong, arrives to study the brain activity of newborns. The lockdown shuts the doors of his laboratory. Guided by a botanist, Alice Sauvage, he moves his protocol onto the old ginkgo and fits it with his brain imaging sensors. The garden keeper, Anton, starts out by making his life impossible. They end up sitting side by side on a bench, watching the tree fertilise itself. Episode shot on digital.

The cinematographer, Gergely Pálos, therefore changed medium with each period, and he received the best cinematography award in Chicago for it. This is not a flourish. The grain changes, the distance changes, and the shot scale changes too. Enyedi puts it very well: in 1908 the camera is glued to Grete, with no emotional distance at all, whereas in 2020 “we see Tony in huge, very wide static shots, a tiny silhouette among the giants who observe him from a distance.”

The 1972 episode took my breath away

A boy alone with a sensor on a geranium, who ends up having the plant open a gate. Fifty years before my word keyboards. It is exactly my setup, one notch down.

And it is not a screenwriter’s invention. Enyedi says she drew on the real experiments of that decade, when researchers stuck electrodes onto potted plants to read their electrical variations, going as far as having one of them operate a garage door. She speaks about it without condescension and without grandstanding: “Those experiments were very primitive, very rudimentary. They simply placed sensors on all sorts of plants, and they were astonished that the plant did indeed show, through electrical impulses, signs of perceiving the world around it.”

This is the Backster period, the period of The Secret Life of Plants, the one I have already written about here and which did so much harm to the question by making it untouchable for laboratories. Enyedi picks it up by the right end. She does not ask whether the measurements were valid, she films what a twenty-year-old boy does with his solitude when a plant answers him.

What the director says, and what she refuses to say

Ildikó Enyedi has been following this work for a long time, and she says so plainly: “I have passionately followed plant communication experiments for decades, that is true.” And the aim she gives her film is even clearer: “One of the aims of this film, perhaps the main one, is to catch a glimpse of a tree’s perspective, its own world.”

What makes the film ring true is that she approaches the question through rhythm rather than through message. “A human lifespan is painfully short compared with that of trees. Our rhythm of life is also radically different. We have a fast heartbeat, we take around fifty breaths a minute. Trees have one in-breath and one out-breath a day.” One in-breath a day. Once you hold on to that, you understand why the camera starts to linger, why the shots stretch out, and why the film takes its time to the point of irritating those who are in a hurry.

On the ginkgo itself, she went looking for what makes it singular. Its natural predators disappeared millions of years ago, and the species has come through the extinctions more or less unchanged. “It is a lonely soul,” she says of her tree.

She consulted scientists, among them Monica Gagliano, whose work I have read and written about right here. And she sets a limit that I find honest: the film “evokes a tree’s perspective, but it does not want to be so pretentious as to tell you: here is what a tree feels.” She offers, she does not hammer it home. Her way of summing up her craft comes down to one word, she speaks of an invitation.

Tony Leung, for his part, spent six months reading botany and neurology before the shoot, and he came out of it transformed. “Before, I treated it as a tree. Now, with everything I have learned about plants, I see it as a sentient being. Something like us humans, except that they live in reverse.”

My criticism, and it bears on courage

The botanist played by Léa Seydoux is called Alice Sauvage. The film never announces it, but the second she talks about Mimosa pudica, you know who she is drawn from. It is Monica Gagliano.

A reminder of what hides behind that plant name. Monica Gagliano drops potted mimosas, again and again, in a rig set to the millimetre. The leaflets fold up at the first shock, as expected. Then the plants stop folding up, because they have established that the fall does them no harm. And twenty-eight days later, they still remember. The paper appears in Oecologia in January 2014, co-signed with Stefano Mancuso, after being rejected by more than a dozen major journals, some without even reading it.

That is what the film summons, and that is all it does with it. A plant name, one line, and we move on. The reference is set down and never developed, barely sketched, as if it were not owned up to. Those who know recognise it, the others see nothing, and nobody has to answer for it. It is a pity, and it is the only real criticism I have to make of Enyedi.

Because the opportunity was enormous, and it was already there in her own structure. That is even what amuses me most in this film. Its three periods land exactly on three moments when the thing really did happen, and it names none of them.

1908. Grete fights to get into a university that does not want her. In exactly those years, Jagadish Chandra Bose is measuring the electrical responses of plants with an instrument nobody else owns, and is turned away by the learned establishment of London. His paper read before the Royal Society on 6 June 1901 would never be published. The grievance was not even experimental, it was lexical. Bose wrote response where reaction was demanded, on the grounds that the first word granted the plant too much initiative. It would take until 1920 for him to be elected to that same society, and until 1992 for a paper in Nature to establish, on a wounded tomato, precisely what he had been forbidden to print. All it took was for Grete to have read Bose. One line, a paper title lying on a table, and the whole episode would have changed weight. A woman refused at the university, holding in her hands the work of an Indian refused at the Royal Society, on plants that people refuse to listen to. The film tells that refusal three times without ever saying it once.

1972. The boy and his geranium. Here it is no longer a parallel, it is my own workshop fifty years early. Damanhur dates the development of its first device to 1976, the direct ancestor of the U1 I use, and the two experiments the community puts forward in its own account are a plant that moves a small cart forward, and a plant that opens a door. A plant that opens a door. That is the scene in the film. Enyedi credits it to a Canadian researcher, and this is where what I hold against her shows most clearly, because she does not give their name. Neither in the film, nor in the interviews I have read. I looked for myself, I did not find them. One line in the credits would have been enough, and I would have hurried off to study their work. I cannot be the only one in that position. And she did not need to look so far afield.

I have a hypothesis about this detour, and I give it for what it is, a hypothesis. Damanhur is an Italian spiritual community, and in Europe that word calls up the word cult in the next sentence. Let me say straight away that I have been there, that I have spent time with the people who live there, and that it is anything but a cult. But the reflex exists, it is powerful, and it does not wait to see before it judges. Naming Damanhur in a film in competition at Venice means handing any hurried journalist the one line they will remember. Canada, on the other hand, is a country beyond suspicion. It is the country of Suzanne Simard, of her British Columbia firs and the underground networks she measured, so the country where communication between plants now has a proper address and a peer-review board. Moving the experiment from Italy to Canada makes it change column, from the cult column to the journal column. I understand the calculation very well. It still costs the researcher their name, and it costs the viewer the one lead they could have followed on the way out.

Add Backster, who clamps a dracaena leaf between two polygraph electrodes on 2 February 1966 at seven in the morning, and The Secret Life of Plants, which would turn it into a worldwide phenomenon in 1973, and you get the year 1972 framed on both sides by people who were doing precisely that.

2020. Monica Gagliano, then, and Mancuso with her, co-signatory of the paper the film quotes without quoting. Mancuso would have given Doctor Wong the vocabulary he lacks every time he tries to explain what he is looking for.

The result is that the film’s defenders have no tools. When someone walks out of the cinema saying that all this is charming and perfectly fanciful, nothing in the film lets you answer them with an experiment, a date, a peer-reviewed journal. Yet these things exist, they are published, and they would have fitted into three lines of dialogue. Enyedi had the right to stay in the realm of sensation, that is her gesture and it succeeds. But she also had the means to arm those who will defend her film, and she did not use them.

The reception, and the real cause for astonishment

Venice, September 2025, official competition. The audience applauds for five minutes and twenty-two seconds. The film leaves with the international critics’ prize, the Marcello Mastroianni award for Luna Wedler, the Green Drop, the Leoncino d’Oro. Then Toronto, London, Cairo, Valladolid, the cinematography prize in Chicago. Among English-language critics, 95% favourable out of sixty-one reviews, and a weighted average of 90 out of 100. In France, on the 1 April release, twenty-two press titles and an average of 4 out of 5. Le Monde runs the headline “Tony Leung and Léa Seydoux eclipsed by a ginkgo biloba”. Télérama writes “unsettling and wonderful”. Première offers the only real reservation of the lot, and it is fair: “Its aridity will leave many at the door, but the journey turns out to be stunningly poetic.”

It is not the reception that surprised me most, it is that such a film exists. Two hours and twenty-seven minutes, three periods, three film formats, four languages, and for a hero a tree that does nothing. No producer in their right mind signs that off on a business plan.

So I looked at how it was financed, and the answer comes down to two things.

The first is a dead man and sheer stubbornness. The project was launched by the German producer Karl Baumgartner, who began developing it with Enyedi before dying in 2014. Reinhard Brundig, at Pandora Film, picked the project up again in 2021. The film therefore took more than ten years to come out of the ground, which is roughly a tree’s time scale compared with a career’s.

The second is European public money. Eurimages put in 500,000 euros at the end of 2023, the regional fund of Hesse 550,000, and behind them come the Hungarian film institute, the German federal funds, the CNC, the European Union’s MEDIA programme, Arte France Cinéma and ZDF/Arte. Four countries in the credits. Enyedi comes in with a Caméra d’Or at Cannes in 1989 and a Golden Bear in Berlin in 2017, which opens doors that nothing else opens. And on the French side, the co-producer is Galatée Films, the company founded by Jacques Perrin in 1968, the company behind Winged Migration and Microcosmos. Its managing director, Nicolas Elghozi, puts their line this way: rethinking the place of the human among the living. He adds that the dialogue between scientific rigour and poetic sensibility is the company’s DNA, and that Perrin’s first reflex, on every project, was to go and see scientists.

In other words, this film was not made possible by a market. It was made possible by institutions that still agree to fund a question, and by a dead producer who had not let go.

That criticism made, I turned off the screen a happy man. In the ten years I have been plugging in plants in front of an audience, I have seen documentaries go by, essays, albums, books that sell in the hundreds of thousands, and a comic in which the forest ends up exterminating us. What I had never seen is a fiction that takes plant consciousness seriously without making it a threat or a lesson, and that treats it as what it has been for me from the start, a relationship. A man, a tree, a clip on a leaf, and the time it takes for something to pass.

The Marburg ginkgo, for its part, is still in its garden. It has noticed nothing. Its next out-breath is due this evening.

Seen on 4 August 2026.