Rarely has a documentary been more drawn to interpersonal clashes than Mo Tan’s Confessions of a Mole, the feature debut by the Warsaw-based Chinese director. From the very beginning of the film, depicting Mo’s last day at the Directing department of the Lodz Film School (in 2018), the camera’s presence is constant and unforgiving. What starts off as an inconspicuous diary film with essayistic traits – especially the first-person narration guiding us throughout the movie’s running time and the occasional flashbacks – takes this confessional tone to an extreme, from Mo’s discovery of a mole on her face, to a crisis of physical and mental health. Confessions of a Mole celebrated its world premiere at IDFA, as part of the festival’s Envision Competition.

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Even though most of the movie takes place in China (and in Chinese), Poland remains a place of dreams and freedom throughout. Hopeful after finishing her degree at the prestigious Lodz Film School, Mo says there are two paths for her now: either to become a successful director back home, or to move in with her parents and stay in the village where she grew up, forsaking any and all career ambitions. She laughs through articulating the latter option, to signal a hopeful, creative future, but when China greets her with a suffocating embrace, the only thing to keep her grounded is the act of filming.

The camera becomes a tool to distance herself from an overbearing mother, to see through an emotionally disconnected father, and to deal with the mounting pressures of marriage and childbearing her wider family imposes on her. While such a set-up is not exactly new or groundbreaking, the sincerity of Mo’s filmmaking is astonishing. Not only does she film fights with her boyfriend and family; she also turns the camera on herself, documenting moments of extreme, neurotic vulnerability. While such scenes have a sensationalist feel to them, this is neither reality TV nor fiction, and the rawness of this footage (be it of the director or her mother) is scarily intimate.

While Confessions of a Mole deals with the kind of personal history that one can only approach through the cracks in the “happy family” narrative, the pic’s title exemplifies how playful its tone can be on occasion. For instance, personifying the mole on Mo’s face becomes a narrative vehicle for the plot, and often, stop-motion animations interrupt the verité style of filming, sometimes even taking up space in the “live action” frame. Animations single out the abstract enemies in the film – an enormous eye epitomises the overwhelming maternal attention, and through stop-motion, props and costumes, the mole, once multiplied, becomes the breast cancer Mo will have to fight. In her voice-over, there’s humour and self-reflection, yet it never feels like justification or compensation for the way we’ve seen her react in the more heated scenes.

However, at the centre, there is a generational wound that keeps getting bigger and bigger the more Mo digs into it. As a result, Confessions of a Mole is destined to be a mix of tones and styles, experimental in the most literal sense of the word, because in it, filmmaking provides the lifeline to keep trying: to live, to change, to make peace with the fractures that love can cause.

Confessions of a Mole is a Chinese-Polish co-production by Beyond Frozen Films, SQUARE film studio and BEEFilm.