#biennale

The film is called The Silence of the Mole (2026), a short work by Czech artist Jakub Jansa and the Slovak duo Selmeci Kocka Jusko (Alex Selmeci and Tomáš Kocka Jusko), shown in the Czech and Slovak Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale.

What the film is about

The film centers on an anthropomorphic mole man named Mr. M., who has played the fictional mole his entire life. The character is a culturally ubiquitous symbol of nostalgia. The film asks what happens to creativity when it is transformed into a tool of cultural representation. Through gorgeous cinematography, it captures moments of Mr. M.'s creative labor and his interactions with the world through his named superpower: unlimited empathy.

What "unlimited empathy" as a superpower means

The phrase operates on two levels simultaneously. On the surface it is a playful, childlike comic-book attribution — the mole character has a "superpower." But the film treats it seriously and critically at the same time:

Imagination — and with it empathy — is depicted as a kind of soft power: something intangible that exists in a legible space but must combat and negotiate its identity with the outside world. Mr. M.'s voice and movements no longer belong to him alone, but to the crowd that monitors his gestures and awaits the performance.

Empathy as "unlimited" is therefore not an uncomplicated gift. It also makes Mr. M. vulnerable and dependent on the expectations of others. The superpower is simultaneously a burden.

The political dimension

At one point in the film, Mr. M. asks "Will we be good today?" — to which the reverberating response comes: "No, no, no way." The question and answer seem aligned with the current geopolitical situation, in which leaders struggle to be "good today."

This is not incidental subtext. This year's Biennale is heavily politically charged: the prize jury resigned to protest the participation of Russia and Israel, and on May 8th the first cultural strike in the Biennale's history took place. In this context, empathy becomes a political statement — its absence in war-waging powers is implicitly set against the model of the mole.

The historical reference: the mole

The mole alludes to Krtek (Little Mole), the famous Czechoslovak animated character created by Zdeněk Miler in the 1950s — one of the best-known cultural exports of the socialist bloc, characterized by gentleness, curiosity, and peacefulness. Casting this figure as the bearer of "unlimited empathy" is a deliberate choice: it invokes collective memory and asks what remains of that legacy when creativity is instrumentalized.

The structural reference: Czech-Slovak reunification

The work marks the 100th anniversary of the pavilion — opened as the Czechoslovak pavilion in 1926 — and is the first joint presentation by the two countries in twenty years. The collaboration quietly suggests that the most enduring divisions are not those drawn on maps, but those we choose — through empathy or its absence — to uphold or dissolve.