Sonder

Movie of the Week: Silent Friend

Dear Friends,

Last week I took our car in for routine maintenance (we have an electric VW ID.4) at the only dealership in Brooklyn in a neighborhood way to the Southwest near the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge where the marathon crosses from Staten Island. While the dealer had the car I had some time to walk around, and what I found especially remarkable about the neighborhood is the diversity of people on the sidewalk. All New Yorkers experience this to some degree, but watching a mix of old Italians, Mexican families, women in full hijab, old bearded men in Orthodox Jewish dress, just to name a few, all sharing the same space while going about their business is a reminder of the diversity of humans and the commonalities we share.

There aren’t many communities in this country or the world where this diversity is a commonplace, everyday experience. It’s one of my favorite things about New York City. Everyone is doing their thing and trying to get by one way or another, dealing with problems, eating and drinking and praying and socializing in their own unique way. Difference surrounds us, ubiquitous and undeniable, experienced firsthand, unmediated.

I was on a walk in the park with two of my sons (and our two dogs) and overheard them talking about the recognition that other people have lives just as unique, deep, and important to them as your own is to you. This phenomenon has a name, “sonder,” a term I’d never heard before my son used it. When I looked it up I discovered why: it was invented in 2019 by John Koenig as part of a project he started called The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, which “seeks to coin and define neologisms for emotions not yet described in the English language.” Sonder is one of the invented words that is slowly making its way into the culture, listed by Merriam-Webster as slang and picked up by one of my sons. Given the importance of language in manifesting thought, creating ideas, and determining how we comprehend the world around us, I’m fascinated by the project. As for sonder, it happens all the time in New York City, and if more people regularly felt it around the world, the world would be a better place.

Like walking an NYC sidewalk, a film can cross cultures and offer a means of making connections across differences, revealing our shared humanity. This week’s movie pick is a film that appears to do this, aiming to connect us not only to each other but also to the natural world. Silent Friend follows a majestic ginkgo tree through connected stories in three different eras. It is written and directed by Ildikó Enyedi, a Hungarian filmmaker whose memorable debut feature My Twentieth Century won the Camera d’Or at Cannes in 1989. She also won the Golden Bear at Berlin in 2017 for On Body and Soul. Ms. Enyedi has been making remarkable films for decades. We’ll catch Silent Friend tomorrow (May 12) at the Angelika at 6:15pm.

While it’s easy to walk down the street in New York City and encounter a range of cultures, encountering diversity in cinema culture is much harder. Hollywood and streaming algorithms are designed to provide us with what we find familiar and comforting. Hollywood traffics in sequels and book adaptations. Netflix calls the ideal show a “gourmet cheeseburger.” While we rebel against billionaires and wars and genocides and environmental destruction, we also must rebel against the cultural powers that limit what we see, isolating us into our own bubbles and promoting what is essentially propaganda. I’ve nothing against “comfort cinema” per se, either in the theater or at home, but let’s be inspired by sonder; there are whole worlds to be explored.

To the pleasure of films and the discussions they spark,

Josh