Private Project

The Birthmark

A mother stumbled upon a girl's purplish birthmark on her left cheek. It reminded her of the infant she had abandoned in Lost and Found seventeen years ago. The girl had a birthmark so similar to her own child. The mother thought it was a gift of fate to have her abandoned daughter reappear in her life. She decided to cherish it and from then on, decided to give the girl a gift every year on her birthday as an atonement. However, in the girl's mind, these presents were just items lost by strangers. It was not until the girl's seventeenth birthday that her mother happened to see the girl put the ukulele she had given her into the Lost and Found. However, the mother did not know that seventeen years earlier, the baby with a purplish birthmark on her left cheek had died in cold swaddling clothes six days after being abandoned ......

  • Xiaoxiao Chen
    Director
  • Haiyue Li
    Director
  • Zixuan Qi
    Director
  • Haiyue Li
    Writer
  • Xiaoxiao Chen
    Writer
  • Jiayi Wu
    Writer
  • Yixiao Zhang
    Key Cast
    "The mother"
  • Zixuan Qi
    Key Cast
    "The girl"
  • Rongxi Chen
    Key Cast
    "The baby"
  • Zixuan Qi
    Photographer
  • Ruiqi Huang
    Editing
  • Yuhui Tian
    Editing
  • Sitong Liu
    Costume
  • Project Title (Original Language):
    胎记
  • Project Type:
    Short, Student
  • Runtime:
    11 minutes 23 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    March 30, 2023
  • Production Budget:
    500 CNY
  • Country of Origin:
    China
  • Country of Filming:
    China
  • Language:
    Mandarin Chinese
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital，24-70mm，RED
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    Yes - Experimental High School Attached to Beijing Normal University
  • SDSZ School Microfilm Festival
    Beijing
    China
    March 30, 2023
    School Premiere
    Official Selection, Best Actor, Best Photography
Distribution Information
  • n/a
Director Biography - Xiaoxiao Chen, Haiyue Li, Zixuan Qi

This film's directors are all high school students.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

Dear members of the judges,
We are Xiaoxiao Chen, Haiyue Li, and Zixuan Qi, directors of the microfilm 'The Birthmark'. We represent our self-established student team, a group of high school students who love film, photography, and life, to say our sincerest words here.

We value the design of lens language, visual beauty, and atmosphere construction. We made 'The Birthmark' after we were inspired by a line from Crime and Punishment: "Doubting maternal love is sinful." When we first read this sentence in the book, we very much agreed with this sentence. But a year later, when we re-study this sentence, we have doubts about it. The charm of literature is that it depicts the most detailed texture of the glory and ugliness of all things in the world. However, their charm is sometimes too shiny, so different kinds of souls in real life often cannot be interpreted by an author's words.

Now we hope to use the film 'The Birthmark' to express another unstereotyped and unbalanced value judgment. Our film has no value rules, and no orientation framework. Human nature is always contradictory, perhaps we should not use a separate "good" or "bad" to define, and committed crimes often have no perfect way to be made up for.
Sincerely,
The Director Team