Ildikó Enyedi, the director of the Golden Bear-winning and Oscar-nominated In Body and Soul, received the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres award from the French Ministry of Culture last night.
France’s iconic cinema and film archive, the Cinémathèque française in Paris, is also paying tribute to her life’s work. The director’s entire cinematic oeuvre has been scheduled to be shown on the occasion of the premiere of her latest film, The Silent Friend, which won 6 awards at the Venice Film Festival, in France Cinemas The Silent Friend will be shown from the 1st of April. The film is still showing in Hungarian cinemas, with more than 44,000 viewers buying tickets for it so far.
The French Order of Merit for Arts and Letters was founded in 1957 and is under the control of the French Ministry of Culture. The Order is awarded to “persons who have distinguished themselves for their artistic or literary work, or for their contribution to the spread of art and literature in France and the world.”The Cinémathèque française will screen the following films from Enyedi’s oeuvre: The Mole (1986), My 20th Century (1989), The Magic Hunter (1994), Tamás and Juli (1997), Simon the Magician (1999), Of Body and Soul (2017), The Story of My Wife (2021) and The Silent Friend. Ildikó Enyedi received a prestigious award after the screening of The Silent Friend, receiving the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (Chevalier of Arts and Letters) from the French Ministry of Culture. A few days later, she will give a master class after the screening of My 20th Century.
In Enyedi’s new film, The Silent Friend, an old tree stands in the middle of a botanical garden. It is lonely, like the other inhabitants of the garden – thousands of kilometres away from their original habitat, so that we can admire and observe them. As we observe them, they observe us. They witness our short, tangled, noisy and troubled lives. The film tells three stories, three hesitant encounters between man and plant, when these two radically different perceptions are truly connected for a moment. Our human heroes, like the plants in the garden, are outsiders, lonely souls. And they yearn for connection just as they do.
The film also stars Tony Leung Chiu-Wai (Strictly Dirty, In Love), Luna Wedler – who won the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best New Actor at the 82nd Venice Film Festival for his performance – and Enzo Brumm. The supporting cast includes internationally renowned actors such as the lead actor of My Wife’s Story, Léa Seydoux (Spectre, No Time to Die), Johannes Hegemann (New Opportunities series), Sylvester Groth (Inglourious Basterds, Darkness series), Rainer Bock (Haneke: The White Ribbon) and Martin Wuttke (Inglourious Basterds).
Update by Aggie Reite
Rolling in Budapest 