‘Silent Friend’ Trailer: Tony Leung Befriends a Ginkgo Tree in Ildikó Enyedi’s Sensitive and Mysterious Venice Breakout

Exclusive: Enyedi's "On Body and Soul" follow-up will launch a retrospective on Leung's career at Film at Lincoln Center.

Even with the upcoming Oscars promising to tie up 2025 with a bow before we turn our attention to the cinema of 2026, there are still movies from last year’s festival circuit making their way into theaters. Case in point: “Silent Friend,” the 2025 Venice premiere that went on to screen at Toronto, is opening in New York and Los Angeles in May courtesy of 1-2 Special.

The film is set to screen at Film at Lincoln Center, where it will kick off a retrospective of Leung’s career that highlights his collaborations with Wong Kar Wai, John Woo, and Hou Hsiao-hsien through a series of screenings and in-person events.

“Silent Friend,” which serves as writer/director Ildikó Enyedi’s follow-up to the Oscar-nominated “On Body and Soul,” tells a triptych of stories about humans trying to communicate with plants. The cast is headlined by “In the Mood for Love” star Tony Leung, appearing in his first European film, alongside Luna Wedler, Enzo Brumm, and Léa Seydoux. The film received positive marks from critics following its Venice premiere.

“In Ildikó Enyedi’s ‘Silent Friend,’ communication between plants and people lies far beyond words, but it is perhaps possible to connect with them more profoundly than we previously assumed,” Leila Latif wrote in her IndieWire review. “Her cinema has never been content with surfaces, instead preferring to peer beneath the everyday.”

The review continued, “The premise is deceptively simple. A single tree in a German university town serves as silent witness to a century of human longing. The film is structured as a triptych: in 1908, Grete (Luna Wedler), the school’s first female student faces near constant misogyny, discovers the universal patterns of life hidden in plants through her black-and-white photography. In 1972, Hannes (Enzo Brumm), a gangly farm boy adrift in a hedonistic haze of hormones and counterculture, stumbles upon a revelation through his contact with a love interest’s geranium. And in 2020, Tony Leung plays Tony, a Hong Kong neuroscientist specializing in babies who, during the enforced silence of the COVID lockdown, experiments in a new field of botany that could force communion with the ginkgo itself.”

“Silent Friend” opens in New York at Film at Lincoln Center and Angelika Film Center on Friday, May 8, before expanding to Los Angeles on May 15. Watch the trailer, an IndieWire exclusive, below.