An enormous ginkgo biloba tree stands motionless as the ages and the lives of the film’s protagonists unfold in the new movie by Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi. In Italian theaters from September 3, 2026, the film features an international cast that includes Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Luna Wedler, Enzo Brumm, Sylvester Groth, and Léa Seydoux, and a setting that helps convey a sense of peace, calm, and magic even beyond the screen. Let’s explore the locations of Silent Friend in the oldest and most authentic heart of Germany.
What is it about
The story unfolds along more than a century of time. It is 1908 when the first woman admitted to the German university in which the film is set discovers, through photography, the existence of universal patterns in plants that explain how knowledge and understanding are formed. In 1972, another student undergoes a profound personal and professional transformation, beginning from the observation of a geranium and the way it grows. In 2020, a neuroscientist from Hong Kong studying the cognitive development of infants finds enlightenment in the plant world.
As the three timeframes continually interweave, a massive specimen of ginkgo biloba remains still, keeping company with the protagonists, their doubts, and a pursuit that, before it is scientific, is innately inner. A question seems to hover throughout Ildikó Enyedi’s film: how can one truly feel in harmony with the rest of creation?
Where was the film shot
Silent Friend was shot in Germany, as mentioned. Among the sets, where scenes were filmed both outdoors and indoors, there is Cologne: the Rhine-facing city, famous especially for its late Gothic cathedral, was chosen for logistical and organizational reasons. The film’s main shooting location, however, is Marburg: it is here that one finds the old university town and the botanical garden with ancient, centuries-old trees where the film is set.
Marburg
The story of this town in Hesse is intimately tied to its university. Founded in 1527 by Philip I, the Philipps-Universität is the oldest Protestant university in the world and, over the centuries, has attracted students who would later become prominent figures across many fields: philosophy, biology, and chemistry.
Even the Brothers Grimm would have studied here: more broadly, Marburg’s fame is linked to their fairy tales, so in the center it’s not hard to come across quirky monuments dedicated to their figures.
Returning to the university citadel where Silent Friend was filmed, it is one of the must-see attractions in the Old Town of Marburg. Visitors can freely tour the great hall, corridors, study rooms, and feel enveloped by that sense of knowledge that lingers in the air.
Officially owned by the university, but effectively available to the city and to those who live there and walk, read, or study there every day, is Marburg’s botanical garden (Botanischer Garten): the film’s most pivotal location for the story. Situated on the Lahnbergen hill, its origins date back to the end of the 18th century, when it was established primarily as a garden of pleasure, where one could admire plant species from all over the world. It was only later that it became, in effect, an open-air classroom for students and researchers.
Divided into sections, it features an Alpinum dedicated to high-altitude plants, a conservatory populated by butterflies, but the most fascinating part is certainly the arboretum where ancient trees such as the ginkgo biloba—central to Enyedi’s film—grow.
Strolling through the garden one may encounter Bronze Age burial mounds that heighten the place’s magic and mystery.
