Confessions of a Mole

After seven years in Poland, the filmmaker returns to China for Lunar New Year and is drawn back into family tensions. When her parents urge her to remove a ‘misfortunate’ mole, illness and tradition collide. Blending documentary intimacy with stop-motion animation and tragicomic tones, the film explores fate, generational trauma, and the rediscovery of love. Tan Mo: ‘This film grows out of observations of intimate relationships, family dynamics, and generational tensions, exploring whether, in a fractured world, we can still find the possibility of dialogue and coexistence within the smallest social unit — the family. We often turn our own traumas into distance, and the act of filming became a way for me to revisit and mend these fractures.

Formally, the film blends the approaches of a caméra-stylo and a cinematic essay, using voiceover to reveal the inner world, stop-motion animation to express fantasies and fears, and an observational lens to capture genuine emotions and subtle interactions. As both director and cinematographer, I am simultaneously the observer and the observed; the camera becomes both witness and blade, exposing vulnerability and contradiction. This is a self-portrait film, an inquiry into where I come from, where I stand, and where I am going.’