It’s been six years since I last went to the London Film Festival from start to finish. There’s just not as much here for me to get excited about as there used to be, so I tend to just dip in and out, catching the train into the city a couple of times to see one or two movies before heading home again. This has always been a festival that prioritises star-studded gala screenings over interesting and unusual cinema, but the pickings in that regard seem to get slimmer every year. I don’t really have it in me to pay three times the price of a normal ticket to see something like Ballad of a Small Player a week or two before it turns up on Netflix, and so my festival has become quite small. Having spent several years traipsing around central London for two weeks every October just to cram it all in, this year I managed to fit pretty much all of what I wanted to see into two Saturday afternoons.
All of this is to say that I only really want to watch something at a festival if I’m going to struggle to see it outside of one. I can’t think of a film that fits into this philosophy more appropriately than Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf, a three-hour film shot on the 3.2 megapixel camera of a 2008 Sony Ericsson W595. A film of absences, in which a man, Irakli, searches in vain for his missing daughter, Lisa, across the vast expanses and abandoned football pitches of the Georgian countryside, accompanied by Levani, her best friend who, without explanation, happens to be invisible. Many of the people they meet are heard but not seen, with Koberidze framing empty reverse shots as if they’re filled with faces. This is one of several leaps of faith demanded by Dry Leaf. The heavily pixelated images are muddy and difficult to make sense of, much like this circuitous search, which keeps hitting dead ends. Koberidze builds an impressionistic patchwork of people and places that evokes the sensation of a dream. Remembered details, like cats and donkeys and apricots, empty village squares and acts of kindness, serve to emphasise the spaces left by the things he’s forgotten, like the faces of the people he meets, or the indistinguishable football pitches that seem to blend into one. But there’s a melancholic longing to fill these spaces. On the road, Irakli often sees kids wanting but unable to find anywhere to play football, while the pitches that serve as landmarks for his search remain overgrown and reclaimed by nature. At one such encounter, a child asks Irakli to help push a heavy goalpost into the ground so they can play. He does, and they do. Dry Leaf suggests that while some things may be gone, they don’t have to stay that way. The act of trying to find them is exactly what keeps them alive.
Claire Denis’s The Fence covers a similar kind of search, only its conclusion is already written. In an unnamed West African country, a man appears at a construction site in the dead of night to recover the body of his brother, only to be met with evasion and resistance from the white foreman and his volatile deputy. Based on a play, the theatricality of The Fence largely works in its favour. These two men stand in spotlights and perform to an audience that already sees through them, from the man himself, patiently asking the same questions, to the armed guards in lookouts above, to the men who work in the kitchen, and even the recently arrived wife of the foreman, whose red dress and high-heels clash awkwardly with the dusty terrain and chain-link fences around her. These loud voices echo across the silent yard and through paper-thin walls. There’s no privacy here, no secrets. Just a series of distractions, and the desperate hope that they can get rid of this man before his quiet insistence becomes a problem for them.
This defensive impulse echoes through Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, too, in which a university professor in Brazil in the late seventies is forced to run from corrupt political forces who will do anything to get him out of their way and siphon off his research funding. He’s given refuge in a small community while he waits for a chance to flee the country, but the threats against him, at first vague and unseen, gradually take concrete form. Mendonça Filho allows information to slowly coalesce over time, with scattered characters, contexts, and motivations eventually colliding in a single time and space. A film about hiding, or, more specifically, of being hidden, The Secret Agent continues Mendonça Filho’s interest in both the myriad pleasures of genre cinema and the communities that form when people stand up against political and bureaucratic aggression. But also, it builds upon the idea of the archive, of piecing together all the disparate angles of an event in an effort to make sense of it.
In Silent Friend, Ildikó Enyedi similarly presents fragments of information and asks that meaning be drawn from them. Not as a means of understanding specific events but as a way of finding parallels in the echoes of history. The film takes place in the same location, the botanical gardens of a German university, across three different time periods. In 2020, a neuroscientist from Hong Kong arrives to teach a course but is left marooned in the deserted university by the onset of the pandemic. In the 1970s, two students study how a geranium experiences and responds to its environment. And in the early 1900s, a young woman overcomes institutional and societal sexism and uses her skills as a photographer to study an assortment of plants. Enyedi cuts back and forth between these time periods on shared moments, like reading the same pages of a book in the library, or touching the bark of the same enormous tree in the gardens, focusing on the act of study and, more significantly, the connections that emerge from these studies. A neuroscientist reaching out to a French botanist over Zoom, a young woman helping an old photographer with his work between classes, and two students falling for one another via a shared interest in flowers. Enyedi has been exploring these kinds of awkward meetings in her work for decades, be it the reunion of separated twins in My Twentieth Century (1989), the frustrating missed connections in Tamas and Juli (1997), or the dreamed encounters in On Body and Soul (2017). In Silent Friend, it’s the simple fact that these people have been pulled together in the first place that’s most of interest. As long as there are spaces that encourage such things, there will always be people willing to devote themselves to solving the endless mysteries of the world, and work together to make sense of things they cannot explain on their own. Silent Friend is a gentle love letter to these spaces, to this quiet university garden, filled with rare plants and the enduring ginkgo tree that echoes through each time period, that has given those curious enough to do so the means of understanding the world for more than a century. For Enyedi, curiosity is natural.