The Silence Of The Banana Trees

Hungary, Portugal, Belgium, Albania, 2022, 24'

A sunny house, filled with lush plants, works of art, photos of youth, travels, happy family moments, promises of a plentiful, shadowless life. Mihály’s house is dotted with objects testifying to his love for his daughter Réka, a talented artist that makes him very proud. However, the image filled with enchantment conveyed by the stories told and the personal film archive cracks when Mihály speaks in the present – an incomprehensible present, marked by disease and distance. The place that promised familial serenity now bears witness to the hero’s grief, which reverberates on the plants, rocks, and birds, overturning the laws of nature and physics. In its abstraction, it is the correspondence provoked by the film director to create an ‘other’ space in which the love and complicity of Mihály and Réka find a new channel: in their memories, the home, childhood, and affection survive intact, and the dialogue has never ceased. With this film, Eneos Çarka continues his investigation of memory, explored here as an intimate dimension of bonding, a quiet place where feelings find shelter from the present.