© Pandora Film Trees can grow many times older than a person - if you let them. The title character in Ildikó Enyedi's nature drama "Silent Friend" is a massive ginkgo on the university campus in Marburg. There it becomes the patron, object of observation and also friend of two scientists and a botanist on three different time levels.
"Silent Friend" is slow watching at its best: meditative scenery, exciting insights and expressive actors of the highest calibre, including Luna Wedler, a new discovery freshly crowned at the Venice Film Festival.

Ildikó Enyedi
Her debut, "My 20th Century", won the Golden Camera for Best Newcomer Film in Cannes in 1989. Since then, author and director Ildikó Enyedi, who was born in Budapest in 1955, has been a regular guest at major festivals with her films. Her free interpretation of the opera "Der Freischütz" (1994) was shown in Venice. Her biblical-inspired thriller "Simon, the Magician" (1999) is shown in Locarno. And in 2017, Enyedi won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for her silent romantic comedy "Body and Soul".

© UPI "To be or not to be" are the first words of the most famous theatre monologue, in which Prince Hamlet reflects on the state of being dead. In Chloé Zhao's film adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's novel "Hamnet", it is the centrepiece of the story of the unequal couple Agnes and William Shakespeare. The spiritual daughter of a landowner and the enterprising poet lose their 10-year-old son to the plague. They each have to grieve on their own, with Jessie Buckley as Agnes undergoing a mother's deeply emotional tour de force.

Chloé Zhao
Chloé Zhao, born in Beijing in 1982, laid the foundations for her career as a director with two documentary-style dramas. "Songs My Brothers Taught Me" (2015) and "The Rider" (2017) tell her stories on location in the Lakota Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. Her natural film style became world-famous with the drama "Nomandland", which won the Oscar for Best Film, Best Director and Best Actress (Frances McDermand) in 2021. After a detour into the Marvel universe with "Eternals" (2021), Zhao returned to her original style for "Hamnet".

© Alamode Film "The Deepest Blue" begins with a utopia of Orwellian proportions: From now on, the comprehensive care of pensioners is the highest state duty in Brazil. De facto, however, it means relocating all old people to a colony deep in the rainforest. But 77-year-old Tereza has no intention of allowing herself to be patronised and takes flight.

Director Gabriel Mascaro has turned this into a witty road trip by water, land and psychotropic drugs that pleads for nothing less than the legal right to self-determination into old age. This year's Berlinale jury honoured the film with the Grand Prix in the form of a Silver Bear.

© Autoscopia Interactive What gets lost? What reappears? Alzheimer's dementia and its effect on the human brain is as individual as the person suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Nevertheless, there are patterns, such as the increasing loss of a sense of time or remembering long-past situations as if they had happened yesterday. More than a game, "As Long As You're Here", developed by Copenhagen-based gaming company Autoscopia Interactive, is an experience. What does life with Alzheimer's feel like? Not only, but above all, relatives of those affected can learn a lot.