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The idea of a Garbage Monster stayed with me for a long time before it finally found its shape — Moormel is the outcome. With this film, I wanted to explore camera movement and emotional depth: to see whether I could make people genuinely feel for a character that is, quite literally, a moss ball. Everything in Moormel is handcrafted — the story, the puppet design and build, and the sets — true to the spirit of stop motion. At the same time, I wanted to combine techniques, which is why I chose to use AI as a tool to generate the backdrops behind the scenery. I know this choice is controversial. I believe AI is a tool we will all have to get used to, and I'd rather experiment with it openly than let it limit my creativity — the story, the puppets, and the sets remain entirely mine, made by hand. Emotionally, I hope to take audiences on a journey that shows them the beauty of nature and its capacity to heal itself — while also making them understand, on a deeper level, that what we are doing hurts nature, and hurts us all.
Country: Germany
Juliane Block is a German writer-director and producer who has been working in film since 2007, when she made her first short film while living in Malaysia. She has since directed five feature films — including the Netflix titles 8 Remains and The Curse of Hobbes House — and more than a dozen short films. Her 2024 stop-motion drama My Deer won Best Animated Short at the Berlin Independent Film Festival. With a background in industrial design, Block draws, sculpts, and builds her own puppets, and trained in puppet-making at StopMoLab in Łódź, Poland. Since becoming a mother, her work has turned increasingly toward family entertainment, animation, and stop-motion. She runs the production company Raav Films in Hannover, where Moormel has been developed.
Deep underground, Moormel and her one-eyed companion Gucker live in perfect symbiosis. When an earthquake...
