Are plants conscious?
It’s a question that Silent Friend, Ildikó Enyedi’s mesmerizing and contemplative new drama, ponders in its decades-spanning saga about an old ginkgo tree, and the different generations of people who cross paths with it. One of those people is Dr. Tony Wong (Tony Leung), a neurology professor who encounters the gingko tree at Marburg University, where he becomes unexpectedly quarantined at the start of the 2020 lockdowns. Struck by the gingko tree and its long history at the university, which he finds dates back to 1832, he starts to apply his neurological experiments to it, hoping to prove that plants are conscious.
