Silent Friend (Stille Freundin)

 

Director Ildikó Enyedi

director on the set

Director with Tony Leung

Director with Léa Seydoux

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SILENT FRIEND (Stille Freundin)               B+                                                               Hungary  Germany  France  China  (147 mi)  2025  d: Ildikó Enyedi

What would you do if you wanted to connect with a being but had no common language?           —Dr. Tony Wong (Tony Leung)

With no explanation or advance warning, viewers won’t have a clue what this film is about, as it’s a collision of science and neurobiology studying the communication of plants, which is a whole new world of exploration, like outer space or deep sea underwater, and not one that makes a whole lot of sense to most of us, as it’s simply unexplored territory.  To do this cinematically, without a whole lot of scientific detail or explanation, defies the odds, but what really stands out is the superb choice in casting, as these are actors who convey so much meaning on their faces without uttering a word, allowing viewers to draw their own conclusions without a director imposing their own commentary.  It may come as some surprise that Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi, maker of the Berlin Golden Bear 1st Prize winning film On Body and Soul (Teströl és lélekröl) (2017), is in her 70’s, which may explain the rather philosophic and contemplative outlook here, with both films balancing between reality and dreams, between body and mind, without ever getting lost in mere mood, combining a poetic visual language with philosophical themes around people and nature. Attempting to understand an inter-connection of all living things, unraveling in an unhurried pace, this is told in a triptych spanning over a century, with each segment set in a different time period, united by a centuries-old Ginkgo biloba tree, one of the oldest tree species on Earth that can live more than 3000 years, originating in the mountains of China, where they were saved from extinction by Buddhist and Taoist monks planting them near their monasteries, viewed as a “living fossil” that has remained virtually unchanged for over 290 million years, outliving the dinosaurs as the sole survivor of an entire ancient plant lineage, standing in a botanic garden at the Alter Botanischer Garten Marburg, a historic arboretum and botanical garden maintained by the University of Marburg in Germany, one of the oldest universities in the world.  As the central figure of the film, standing in all its glory, some 50 to 80 feet high, the film has a way of observing those who pass by, observe, and study this tree, becoming a very quiet and meditative film that may have limited appeal.  But for those who can appreciate such a radical approach, this is a minimally plotted film that reaches out to all the senses, asking us to reconsider the plant life and natural world all around us, filled with so much we still don’t understand, perhaps filled with a consciousness not too dissimilar from our own, embedded with secrets that lend itself to further study.  What gets scrutinized here is how the life of a tree and the life of an academic institution change over time, adding new layers that weren’t there before, both becoming living and breathing lifeforms.  The way the film is shot, however, gives the school a very modern look, where this is a juxtaposition of old and new, becoming something of a visual bonanza, with equal parts academic and the purely sensorial, beautifully shot on different film mediums by Gergely Pálos, who also shot Roy Andersson’s abstractly surreal About Endlessness (Om det oändliga) (2019), using 35mm black and white in the 1908 period, 16mm in the 1972 period, and digitally for 2020, including extensive use of time-lapse photography, where some shots are even filmed from the tree’s perspective.  Interestingly, without any fanfare, all the women in the film are primarily seen as pioneers, however, rather than promote feminism, this never gets bogged down into a message film, but instead becomes more of an instructive art piece that helps us appreciate the natural world around us, which may transcend all political ideologies or societal conflicts, becoming a serene experience with our “silent friends.”      

In a collaborative production involving Germany, France, Hungary, and China, the film opens through the pensive eyes of Dr. Tony Wong (Hong Kong cinema legend Tony Leung, long associated with Wong Kar-wai, making a rare appearance in a Western film in a role written specially for him), an esteemed neurologist from Hong Kong who arrives at the German university as a visiting professor, who studies how infant brains function and how they absorb information, seen studying the brain wave patterns of newborns as he provides stimulation from puppets, which he describes as lantern-like consciousness, or moving through the different stimuli, and then comparing that to how adults see the world around us, which he refers to as spotlight (or single point) consciousness.  Colorful images are projected onto his computer while an electronic soundtrack by Hungarian composers Gábor Keresztes and Kristóf Kelemen weaves a musical interlude connecting him to the world around him, from the plentiful students wandering the canvas grounds to the world of giant trees filling the gardens, only to be stranded there when COVID hits in 2020, unable to continue his work, suddenly seen wearing a mask, so his interest turns to the natural world around him, taking regular visits to the garden grounds, becoming fascinated by an old ginkgo tree that was planted in 1832.  What follows is an ultra-crisp black and white sequence at that same German university, taking us back to 1908 as botany student Grete (Luna Wedler) is being interviewed by an all-male panel of professors to become the university’s first female student almost 400 years after the university was founded, skillfully providing detailed answers, yet unspoken prejudices hang heavily in the air and color every question, as the professors get a big kick out of trying to humiliate her and make her uncomfortable with sexual language, especially when they compare a flower’s petals to “the bridal bed” and ask her to evaluate 20 men in the same bed with a single woman, wondering what she thinks of that, where she quickly retorts that they’re speaking of plants, not humans, which sharply cuts through the crap.  Her quick-wittedness and scientific expertise impresses the professors, yet sexism and misogyny make clear just how hostile academia is to her.  Nonetheless, as the lone female in a school filled with probing male eyes, she is viewed differently, paying more attention to her behavior and the way she speaks, and formally dresses, than what she has to say, which is routinely ignored, as none view her as a scientific scholar in the making.  Moving to 1972, Hannes (Enzo Brumm, in his first major role) is a naïve, working class, young literature student who hopes to study poetry, evoking Goethe and Rilke, displaying a certain small-town awkwardness in the presence of more free-spirited, counterculture student protests and casual drug use, where he comes in contact with his housemate, Gundula (Marlene Burow), a liberated and confident botanist who is studying plant life, experimenting with plant consciousness by wiring up a geranium in her room, with a machine registering the changing sensor readings, much like a lie detector test, a hypothesis that Dr. Wong will expand upon decades later.  The film may be criticized for anthropomorphizing plants, imbuing them with human characteristics, where unless you’re an expert in this field, it’s hard to imagine that plants are as sentient as humans, yet we also send out space probe searches for signals and signs of life, which is precisely the point, as these sequences are cleverly weaved together through the power of imagining, where it’s the silences that stand out, as viewers read the subtle facial expressions of the protagonists, where so much is left unspoken and undefined.  While it veers towards experimental cinema, it’s a surprisingly humane film that features some outstanding performances.

Listed at #36 from the Sight & Sound list of the best films of the year, inspired by the works of German photographer Karl Blossfeldt, with a little soul-searching from German forester Peter Wohlleben and pioneering Italian ecologist Monica Gagliano thrown in as well, the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2025 where it was described as “the tree movie,” winning the Fipresci Prize, while Luna Wedler won the Best Young Actress Award.  After the university interview, Grete takes refuge in the serene calmness of the ginkgo tree, which has an identifying label, Ginkgo biloba, 1832, followed by an early morning meeting of Grete with other women under that same ginkgo tree, all changing into loosely fitting white outfits that resemble Greek goddesses, as they collectively do what resembles a Dionysian dance of the Furies in harmony with nature (Luna Wedler studied contemporary dance for two years), mannered in the neoclassicism of Isadora Duncan, Isadora Duncan (1877-1927).  Equally impressive is a sequence of shots revealing the emptiness of the school hallways, and staircases, which resemble modern geometric shapes, or the cafeteria, with its giant windows looking outdoors over the rooftops at the surrounding trees, with Dr. Wong often seen sitting alone, where the vantage point shifts from him peering out to looking back in through his reflection off those massive windows, while we also see him in his sterile room where he lives alone.  We learn Hannes, who harbors a secret crush on his roommate, lives upstairs in an attic apartment in the same home as Gundula, who lives downstairs, but it features a transcendent moment of Hannes sitting alone listening to the music of Wagner, Lohengrin, Act I: Prelude YouTube (9:51), while Gundula sits in a window below smoking a cigarette, where the sound permeates through the house, attached gardens, and surrounding woods, offering a memorable yet haunting sensory moment.  Wong and Greta are also connected by images of them both standing under the same tree one hundred years apart, where it has grown massively, Silent Friend new clip official from Venice Film Festival 2025 - 1/2 YouTube (1:11).  Similarly, Hannes and Grete are connecting by a stone water fountain with water spurting out of a lion’s mouth, exquisitely merging the past and the present, Silent Friend new clip official from Venice Film Festival 2025 - 2/2 YouTube (1:37).  These sequences are balanced with outdoor nature shots of the substantial garden grounds outside the university, where the ginkgo tree becomes a primary subject in different shades of light, with a prominent sound design of birds chirping and bugs buzzing, and what resembles cosmic interludes between the sequences, with recurring, surreal images of the movement of tree roots, in all their entangled complexity, which resemble brain synapses, like a sentient being, where the stunning look of the film won a best cinematography award at the Chicago Film Festival 2025.  Besides the commonality of the ginkgo tree, what stands out in this film is how humans fail to adequately express themselves and communicate with one another, and while each protagonist is a scientist, in their own way they all have a vested interest in understanding the nature of plant life, making this a subversive sensory experience about the joy of thinking and feeling, with suggestions that communication exists in many forms, far beyond the limits of human language.  As much as we try to socialize and remain connected to others, sometimes what we most identify with is the expressive quality of the natural world, where the mammoth size of some trees dwarf their human counterparts.     

There are equally striking inharmonious sequences, like the scene of Grete getting scolded for what is presumed to be scandalous behavior by her stern, rooming house mother, as she returned home with wet clothing, which she immediately infers comes from promiscuous activity, throwing her out on the spot, no questions asked, sending her off into the street, which ultimately leads her to the storefront photography studio of Herr Fuchs (Martin Wuttke), an elderly man who is offering a position as a photographer’s assistant in exchange for room and board, quickly adapting to this new profession, taking pictures that merge art, science, and the human anatomy, using photography to uncover universal patterns in plants, inspired by British botanist/photographer Anna Atkins.  Dr. Wong also has video chats with a fellow colleague isolated by the pandemic, French botanist Dr. Alice Sauvage (Léa Seydoux), who essentially asks, “What if plants perceive us in the same way that we perceive them?”  The film doesn’t try to provide answers, instead showing that there might be things in life that we are not yet aware of, where we remain blind to the possibilities.  She’s interested in how plants commune and reproduce, and only appears on phone or computer screens, with Wong quickly adapting a new research study trying to match his own neurological patterns with the ginkgo’s activity by attaching an improvised brain scanner on it, suspecting a deep relationship, veering towards a psychedelic experience, between what is seen and unseen.  However, Anton (Sylvestor Groth), the university’s janitor and only other person remaining on campus, appears to be troubled by the research, finding Wong’s Asian or foreign presence equally distressing, and destroys the equipment.  Since there’s no one else on the grounds it’s not hard to figure out who’s responsible, but after utilizing his phone’s language translation tool and explaining what he’s up to, they actually end up working together harmoniously.  There’s a striking song that plays near the end to a sole image of the ginkgo tree in full autumnal colors, shot in a slow backwards zoom that reveals the magnificence of the entire tree, sung by the German industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten, featuring Blixa Bargeld, Blixa Bargeld - Ein Gleiches (Goethe Interpretation) YouTube (3:37), composed specifically for the film on a lyric by Goethe.  Though easily the most original musical selection is the use of a song by Guatemalan singer Gaby Moreno, Gaby Moreno - Til Waking Light YouTube (4:47), accentuating her powerhouse vocal range, moving from tender whispers to a soaring intensity, which is used twice, once during a scientific breakthrough mixed with moving electronic colors and again over the end credits.  The electronic imagery associated with plants recalls the final imagery of Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World (Bis ans Ende der Welt) (1991) where brainwaves are transformed into a kaleidoscope of intersecting forms and shapes and colors.  What’s also impressive is the long list of plant species used in the film, which are all listed in the final credit sequence, a much longer list than the credited human actors.  The first hour or so is simply brilliant, masterfully directed, beautifully edited together by Károly Szalai, blending together abstract imagery, moving effortlessly between the time frames, where you never know what to expect, expressing a new world of discovery, but it does become more predictable and drags a bit by the end of a two and a half hour movie, but it’s still an unforgettable experience.  Dedicated to German producer Karl Baumgarten, affectionately known as Baumi, who was a leading European distributor of international arthouse films, founder of Pandora Film and The Match Factory, who began developing the project with Enyedi until he died in 2014, revived a decade later, drawing from European public money to finally come to fruition.

Silent Friend {Stille Freundin} Sylvester Groth-Enzo Brumm ... Entire film online with English subtitles, YouTube (2:27:04)

Romería

 

Director Carla Simón

director on the set

Carla Simón with actress Llúcia Garcia 

Llúcia Garcia

Llúcia Garcia with Mitch Martín

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ROMERĺA                  A-                                                                                                        Spain  Germany  (112 mi)  2025  d: Carla Simón

For many people, family is something that is just there, but for me those relationships had to be built. When I was very young, my parents died of AIDS, and I went to live with my aunt and uncle. I never took the family bond for granted, I observed their dynamics with a distance not everyone has. Both my biological and adoptive families are numerous: there are many siblings, cousins, uncles, aunts, uncles, grandparents… I have always been surrounded by family. There is deep love, but also a load of wounds, traumas and aspects that are difficult to manage. In that mix, there is a lot of material to tell stories…

I don’t think I would have discovered much about my own family without film. In fact, Romería has ended up becoming a film about the desire to make films, even though that was not the initial idea. It was something that came up while I was writing the script: at a certain point, I realized that the main character should carry a camera. This made her a much more active character. For me it was very natural, because it was all born out of very personal experience. I think the film can be understood, among other things, as a story about the birth of a filmmaker’s gaze.

Romería is, above all, a film about memory and the need to explain ourselves, to find a story that makes sense of who we are. But it also stems from a certain frustration: what happens when you don’t have that story, when no one around you can satisfactorily tell you where you come from? In my case, film has been the tool that allowed me to invent it, to construct it for myself.

—Director Statement from Carla Simón

Your gaze pierces my eyes like a sword

—Tu mirá, by Lole y Manuel, 1976, Lole y Manuel - "Tu mirá" (1977) HD YouTube (2:43)

A stunning arthouse film that resembles the kinds of films seen in the 50’s and 60’s, when European cinema reached its undisputed artistic peak, an era of explosive innovation that birthed not only modern arthouse film, but revolutionized global storytelling.  Rejecting the Hollywood formula, these are films that prioritized ambiguity, psychological depth, and philosophical inquiry over more conventional linear resolutions, often using dream sequences or flashbacks to accentuate internalized moods and feelings.  Stylistically, this film is much more inventive than anything we’ve seen before from this director, who graduated in Audiovisual Communication at the University of Barcelona before winning a scholarship to the London Film School where she obtained her master's degree.  The third and final part of a semi-autobiographical family trilogy that began with SUMMER 1993 (2017), a tender immersion into the world of a newly orphaned six-year-old girl navigating a tangle of confusion after she is sent to live with her aunt and uncle in the Catalan countryside following the death of both parents from AIDS, an experience drawn from her own childhood memories, followed by her second feature, Alcarràs (2022), an earthy, near documentary exposé of a farming family on the brink of change, told in the humanist tradition of Italian neorealism, which won the 1st Place Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2022.  In this concluding episode, premiering at Cannes in 2025, the story takes place over five days in 2004, where that same six-year old girl is now eighteen, traveling from Barcelona to Vigo, an inlet port city on Spain’s northwest Galician coast, with a view of the Ría de Vigo, sheltered from the Atlantic by the Cíes Islands, in search of a family she’s never met, revisiting the unresolved questions of her own heritage, uncovering the long-buried secrets behind her parents’ lives and mysteriously concealed deaths, as she slowly learns uncomfortable secrets about her parents’ unconventional life and turbulent past.  This quietly understated, much more subjectivized indie film, largely realized by conversations and flashbacks, is mainly supported by visual style and atmosphere in a sea and sun-drenched experience that is full of warm colors, as it aims to recover the legacy of a forgotten generation, part of a Spanish historical memory that deserves to be revisited.  Simón uses the revolutionary flamenco music of Lole y Manuel as a vital sonic thread, where the specific concept of the “gaze (La mirá)” aligns with the film’s exploration of memory, perspective, and how the young protagonist reconstructs the fragmented history of her biological parents, using a poetic and emotional connection that also functions as a tribute to flamenco that her parents listened to, featured diegetically (meaning the characters can hear it within the scene), cementing the identity and emotional weight of the family’s past.  Adding to the family experience, the filmmaker’s brother, Ernest Pipó’s soundtrack fueled by piercing violin staccato notes adds an element of something bubbling under the surface, Romería (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (59 seconds).

First and foremost, Simón introduces us to newcomer Llúcia Garcia in her first role, discovered as she was returning from summer camp in an open-air casting call of 3000 young women on the street, who is simply breathtaking in the role of Marina Piñeiro, an 18-year-old orphan attempting to piece together the lives of her late parents through memory, imagination, and fragmented family stories, guided by her mother’s diary, attributed to the letters of Simon’s own late mother, Neus Pipó Simón, which often differs from what she hears from relatives, but helps bridge the gap between memory and imagination, with title cards, one for each day, asking somewhat philosophical questions (“What would I be if my father’s family had raised me?”) acting as chapter headings for her five day “pilgrimage” to Vigo, which is what the title refers to in Spanish and Catalan.  An aspiring filmmaker from Barcelona, Marina (a stand-in for the director) needs her paternal grandparents to sign an official document confirming her bloodline in order to secure a film school scholarship (as Simón did), because her father’s death certificate lists him having no children, which could either be an inadvertent error or an indication that his side of the family refuses to recognize her existence.  As she is introduced to aunts and uncles, and an army of cousins, she stays on the houseboat of Uncle Lois (Tristán Ulloa), his wife Denise (Celine Tyll), and their three rambunctious sons, taking a liking to the oldest, Nuno (Mitch Martín, aka Mitch Robles, lead singer and guitarist for a 70’s-inspired Madrid rock band The Boston Babies), who is about her same age.  Almost immediately, there are contradicting narratives about her late parents, who both died of AIDS when she was a child, Romeria : extrait (Cannes 2025) YouTube (1:21), where each family member only knows fragments of the story, with the memories often contradicting each other, making the truth increasingly difficult to trace, becoming a tale of hidden secrets and discovery.  Probing a hidden chapter of Spanish history, it’s important to remember the times, as the end of Franco’s repressive dictatorship in 1975 led to La Movida Madrileña, an underground countercultural movement in Madrid that led to a rebellious, hedonistic counterpoint to the ultra-conservative Catholic society, resulting in prolific drug use, as many people got hooked on heroin, immediately followed by a massive outbreak of deaths from AIDS, which was simply not talked about, as if it never happened, leading to what many have called a lost generation, beautifully documented in the early films of Pedro Almodóvar, especially ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER (1999).  This coincides with the youthful period of Simón’s parents, with their relationship happening during that same period of the 80’s, with Spain having the highest rate of AIDS-related deaths in Europe, where it still remains hard for families to accept, as they simply stopped talking about it, so many of those stories have been silenced for decades.  Shame continues to reverberate through Marina’s entire family, as the stigma of how her father died and was ostracized continues to linger in their minds and attitudes toward her, with her bourgeois conservative grandparents still seething in resentment and anger, warning their offspring to never touch her blood as she has a “blood disease.”  Only her black sheep Uncle Iago (Alberto Gracia), himself an ex-junkie, gives Marina a more accurate depiction of the wild life and early death of her parents.

Carla Simón’s films are deeply shaped by memory, loss, and the emotional afterlives of family history, reflected in elusive family moments that we may never fully understand, where the inherently fragmented nature of memory plays a role, but the main obstacle is the stigma surrounding AIDS, which clouds these memories.  To portray the AIDS mass extinction in Spain, the director draws on a ghostly dance at a festival, with dancers covered in white sheets, like corpses, set to the macabre Spanish 1980’s hit Bailaré sobre tu tumba (I’ll Dance on Your Grave) by the Vigo punk band Siniestro Total, Siniestro Total : Bailaré sobre tu tumba ( HQ ) YouTube (3:04).  Marina learns her father actually died years later than she was led to believe, while her sternly cold and less-then-forthcoming grandparents, who have never really accepted her (“There are things that are not talked about in this family”), attempt to offer her money to halt her probing, which she refuses to accept, as her primary mission is uncovering the truth, recalling the “memory retrieval” of a recent Hungarian film, Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron (2025).  To fill in the massive gaps left by her relatives’ unreliable memories, Marina reads fragments of her biological mother’s diary and uses her camcorder to reconstruct their past, where the film is an exploration of personal material, drawing from her own family and experiences, while engaging with themes of adolescence and trauma that have been central to the filmmaker’s artistic identity, yet realized through her own distinct aesthetic.  There are more visual asides here than previous films, accentuated with a visual beauty and unmatched sensitivity along with a voiceover that keeps the viewer attentive to the story, effortlessly captured through the brilliant cinematography of Hélène Louvart, who has worked closely with Agnès Varda and Alice Rohrwacher, providing poetic flourishes that amaze, including some stunning underwater sequences of naked bodies swimming through the reefs, recalling Helen Mirren’s first screen role in Michael Powell’s AGE OF CONSENT (1969).  Quite simply, this is the artist as we’ve never seen her before, a poetic and visually vibrant film, grounded in familiar narrative territory, yet told in such a distinctively different way, where it’s hard not to be drawn to the enticing visual palette.  The immensely sympathetic Llúcia Garcia is the dealbreaker, like a young Léa Seydoux, whose intoxicating screen presence drives the picture, giving us a multi-layered performance of a character who is independent and determined.  While mostly staying in the background at family gatherings, she isn’t shy about asking about her parents, especially when alone with a family member, and while many of the relatives are hard to decipher as they go whizzing by the screen, like interchangeable parts, she is the one constant that holds it all together, which is why an unexpected, late-film dream transformation is so powerful, and also deeply unsettling.

Often easy to overlook a director with a gentle touch, where this is arguably her most introspective work, Simón’s film only confirms she is one of the most singular voices in European cinema, as the relationship of Marina’s parents is only referred to, a piece of a puzzle that’s hard to understand, for decades clouded in secrecy, but it’s brought to light in the most unusual way, as she has the secret intention of visiting the places where her parents were happy, where the quest for truth gives way to the imagination, the culmination of an existential journey where pain coexists with joy.  Of all things, it’s a frisky cat that leads Alice down the rabbit hole, as Marina similarly follows an elusive cat down to the wharf, climbing into a rowboat.  At this point, the film’s grounded neorealism evolves into an immersive, dreamlike imagination, as Marina is transported back to 1983, and takes the rowboat to the private island of Toralla. Playing out like a memory poem, Marina meets her parents on the rooftop of the building where they lived together, where a startling realization is that her father is played by Mitch Martín, the actor who plays Nuno, while Llúcia Garcia is transformed into her mother, who is seen with Marina’s father traveling to remote Cíes islands by sailboat, both frolicking naked on the beach, a reflection of their free-spirited love and latent sexual liberation that recalls Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1969), or before that the free-spirited sexuality of Harriet Andersson in Bergman’s Summer with Monika (Sommaren med Monika) (1953), a reminder of how great cinema can be, while also showing unflinching images of their drug use, with the voice of actress Laia Manzanares narrating her story through fragments of her diary.  Money becomes an issue, as heroin is not cheap, causing the two of them to become more and more reclusive as they battle with heroin withdrawal.  Perhaps the closest films that express that freewheeling, drug-ridden bohemian lifestyle of her parents’ era are Barbet Schroeder’s debut counterculture film MORE (1969), where a young hippie couple’s visit to the idyllic island of Ibiza degenerates into unending tragedies from heroin addiction, or Philippe Garrel’s own heroin-indulgent exploits with his real-life girlfriend Nico from the Velvet Underground in I Don’t Hear the Guitar Anymore (J'entends plus la... (1991), which is also an impressionistic memory piece, darkly moody and self-absorbed to the point of being narcissistic, yet revelatory in its own sensory style.  What’s important here is how Marina internalizes everything she’s learned and literally steps into her parents’ lives in the 1980’s, much like Tilda Swinton in Joanna Hogg’s Caprice (1986), opening up a phantasmagorical world that exists only in the imagination.  The final flashback sequences in particular, shot in wonderfully grainy Super 8 images, add a gorgeous impressionistic texture, yet this surreal act of remembering gives the film a more personal sense of understanding that she could not get from her estranged family, allowing a deeply imaginative poetry of memory and reconciliation to unfold before our eyes.