To sum up the film in three words: psychology, photography and plants.
The movie follows 3 people, from 3 different time periods, that revolves around one tree’s life, a ginkgo tree.
We start with Dr. Wong, who came from China to Germany to continue his study on babies’ brains and how they actually react to certain stimuli. This concept is seen throughout the film.
Shortly after he moved to Germany, that’s when the pandemic hit and shut everything down.
Dr. Wong is stuck on the college campus and is unable to do his studies or to go back home, so he starts to wonder what to do with his time.
One night, he’s watching science talks and sees one about how plants have feelings.
This is the start of the story lines.
Three Storylines
First storyline: going back to 1908 and the first female student to be accepted into the university.
Gundula, a botany student, gets accepted into the school by some strange means.
After being accepted, some bad stuff went down, and she had to find a home as an elder photographer assistant, which offered room and board.
From there, we see how her year unfolds and how she finds a new passion, along with her flowers.
Next, we move to 1972, where we meet Hannas.
We don’t know what his major is, but later in the film, it looks like something that goes with mechanical or some type of machine work.
He meets a woman named Grete, who is in school for botany.
Grete’s experiment is seeing if her flower reacts to her, mostly measuring the flower’s emotions and if they react to her more or not.
When she leaves for a trip, Hannas is in charge of taking care of the plant.
During his time of caring for the plant, he starts to notice how the plant reacts to him and starts doing his own experiments with the flower as well.
Coming back to 2020, we meet up with Dr. Wong (or Tony).
Tony wants to see, like his experiment with the babies, he wants to see if the tree has thoughts or emotions to express.
During the experiment, he runs into some issues with the equipment and the human variant.
By the end, you see how this one tree ties the three people at this German university.
I highly recommend this film to everyone and anyone, especially if you like psychology-based films.
The dialogue in the film is easy to understand, the story lines fit well together and the stories are beautifully told.
The next showings for this film, Silent Friend:
- Thursday April 23, at 2:15 p.m. at Downer Theatre
- Wednesday April 29, at 1:30 p.m. at Oriental Theatre.