Review: A Silent Friend
Laura Zeng
Imagine The Giving Tree, but without any of the problematic implications: A Silent Friend is a beautiful meditation on life, time, and love as grounded by a single ginkgo tree in Marburg, Germany. Written and directed by Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi, three stories are told across the years of 1908, 1972, and 2020. In 1908, flora inspires boldness; in 1972, it inspires romance; and in 2020, it inspires Tony Leung, playing a neuroscientist stuck on campus because of the pandemic, to experiment with something new. A Silent Friend is anti-narrative, instead championing atmosphere and emotion. It’s a film best watched on the big screen, and hearkens to films like Train Dreams, Perfect Days, or Nomadland. It captures a feeling more than it tells a story, and is thus best experienced in the quiet communion of a dark theater.
Laura Zeng
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She / Her
Laura Zeng is a Chinese-American freelance journalist based in New York with a humanities background and a passion for bold, international storytelling. Her work ranges from reporting on Olympic subcultures to interviews on the nature of artistic practice for The Creative Independent. Her first film review was published at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and she has worked in development at Temple Hill Entertainment, Pretty Matches Productions, and for Oscar-winning producer Bruce Cohen. She is currently interning at A24 and working on a feature film shooting in the UAE about the first female Arab astronaut. Laura is drawn to cinema that centers on underrepresented perspectives across borders, and which interrogates culture through form.