March 22 / 6:30 pm / Ottawa Art Gallery

Program: 16mm, Silent Friend

Feature presentation \

Acclaimed, multiple award-winning Hungarian writer-director Ildikó Enyedi (My Twentieth Century, Of Body and Soul et al.) delivers a mesmerizing dramatic triptych in her latest film. Winner of the Marcello-Mastroianni Prize and the Green Drop Award at the Venice Film Festival, Silent Friend is one of the most daring and original films to come along in recent years. In the heart of a botanical garden in a medieval university town in Germany stands a majestic and ancient ginkgo tree. For close to two centuries, this natural witness has silently observed the transformation of three human lives: in 2020, Tony, a neuroscientist from Hong Kong, exploring the neurological patterns of babies, begins an unexpected experiment with the old tree; in 1972, young student Hannes’s thinking is changed radically by the simple act of observing plant life; and 1908, this same university’s first ever female science student Grete discovers, through the lens of photography, sacred patterns of the universe hidden within the humblest of plants. We follow these three characters in three different eras as each is transformed by the quiet, enduring, mysterious power of nature. With its striking multi-narrative structure and its poetic cinematic style, Silent Friend evokes a sense of profound wonder at our world. In many ways, it is the terrestrial counterpart to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. You will not see the world the same way after experiencing this magnificent piece of cinema. Brilliant. Breathtaking.

Tom McSorley

“We humbly acknowledge and embrace our specific perceptual limits. This film speaks, with the help of light and sound waves available for the human eyes and ear, of world perceptions outside these limits. We acknowledge that we are not the default — our is one of the many, equally valid worlds. What is it like to be a tree? We don’t know. So, we won’t show it. Instead, we show human curiosity, touchingly imperfect attempts of connecting, of acknowledging the “other” and accepting that for them we are the mysterious ‘other.’”  

Ildikó Enyedi  

Short film \

16mm

2025 / 3 minutes / Quebec
Director: Francis Théberge
Language: No dialogue

Through a succession of grainy image fragments, ambient noise, burned or erased film stock, the film evokes supposed personal archives—forgotten holidays, anonymous faces, domestic scenes. But nothing is real.