Silent Friend is a movie that asks whether trees listen to us acting as silent friends in our lives?
The movie is set at a German university over three time periods.
First the 1800’s, where we meet a young woman trying to enter the world of university science. The male dominated institution is having none of it. They do everything they can to put her off during the interview, but her intellect and determination see her get in. During hard times, like the interview, she takes solace in nature, particularly a large ginkgo tree on the university campus.
Roll on several years to around the 1960’s or 70’s it’s not clear. We meet two students at the same university. One is running an experiment about whether plants have a sense of us being in the world. She does so by attaching a monitor to a potted plant on her windowsill, the 24/7 computer printout tracking any changes. Another student, a friend living in the same complex, offers to look after the plant when she joins a sit-in.
Lastly we jump to recent Covid times where we meet a neuroscience professor at the same university. His specialty is mapping babies brains to measure how they interact with the world around them. When the campus goes into lock down he comes across research about how trees interact with the world and whether we have an impact on them. The similarities with his own research soon have him setting up an experiment using the same large ginkgo tree still standing after all these years.
As the credits rolled and the audience sat in silence I pondered:
- Coming in at two and a half hours, I wasn’t sure I’d last the distance, but this movie is surprisingly addictive;
- The images are stunning and the atmospheric music dispels the need for dialogue;
- The movie can best be described as David Attenborough meets the Dala Lama, with a couple of relationships thrown in;
- At the end of the movie I felt a sense of peace, serene.
For more information go to Perth Festival
-
overall
