Join the Liszt Institute for a very special screening of Ildikó Enyedi’s 2025 masterpiece, Silent Friend, followed by a live Q&A with the director. It is a rare chance to hear Enyedi discuss her work in person, ahead of the film's UK distribution.

About the film:

Silent Friend is set in the botanical garden of a university town in Germany and unfolds across three time periods, 1908, 1972 and 2020, each centred on a different attempt to understand or communicate with plant life. A ginkgo tree, present throughout, links the three stories: a photography student in 1908 who finds in nature the patterns she is denied in her scientific studies; a young student in 1972 changed by his observation of a geranium; and, in 2020, a neuroscientist, played by Tony Leung Chiu-wai, who turns his research toward the tree itself. Enyedi shot each period in a different format, moving between digital, 16mm and 35mm, so the texture of the image shifts with the era. The film premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival in September 2025 and also screened at Toronto.

Content Warning: The film contains scenes of suicide

The film will be screened in the original language (English and German), with English subtitles.

About the director:

Enyedi is one of the defining figures of contemporary Hungarian cinema. Her 1989 debut, My Twentieth Century, won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes. After an eighteen-year gap from feature filmmaking, during which she worked in television and raised her family, she returned in 2017 with On Body and Soul, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Silent Friend follows The Story of My Wife (2021) as her third feature since that return, and continues her longstanding interest in the boundaries between science, perception and feeling.

Event schedule:

Doors: 17:50

Introduction: 18:00

Silent Friend screening: 18:10

Film ends: 20:35

Q&A with Ildikó Enyedi: 20:40

Event ends: 21:10