Hungarian cinematographer Gergely Pálos received the award for Best Cinematographer at the 61st Chicago International Film Festival for his work on Silent Friend. The film is the most recent work of Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi and is a German-French-Hungarian co-production, made with the support of the Hungarian National Film Institute.
It draws a parallel between the relationships of plants and humans, and it won six awards at the Venice Film Festival earlier this year. Silent Friend tells three stories, with the creators distinguishing between the three time periods of the plot by recording each of them in a different way. The scenes from 1908 were shot in black and white on 35mm film, the distinctive imagery of the 1970s appears on 16mm film, and the year 2020 was shot digitally.
Charity screening at BIFF
The new film of Golden Bear-winner and Oscar nominee Ildikó Enyedi is set to be released in Hungarian cinemas on January 29, 2026, but the audience will be able to see it prior to its premiere on Tuesday, October 28, at the Budapest International Film Festival, at the Corvin Cinema. Tickets for the screening sold out days ago, and the festival will donate the proceeds towards the second installment of BIFF's film financing program, Cine-Collegium Budapest.
In its first year, CCB collected 25 million forints in direct financial support, as well as numerous donations from the film industry (including props and furniture, camera and lighting equipment, studio use, post-production) for the production of a feature film with a budget of approximately 100 million forints. A total of 16 eligible film projects were submitted in response to the call for entries in the spring of 2025, from which the jury, after a lengthy deliberation, selected Rudolf Olivér's project Anyám, a szörny (My Mother, the Monster) as the winner.
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