Well, either that, or ‘this way a man can look at a woman’ makes her feel like an object. When I wrote The Gaze I had the latter case in mind. Thus I put my main character (Elias) in a situation in which his typically male gaze is repeatedly contested by a woman (Lilith) who takes a firm feminist stance.
The film itself performs the male gaze with a series of point of view shots of Lilith’s body even before she has been introduced as a character. Everything that follows – Elias’ confrontations with Lilith, his phantasmatic daydream, the bleak ending of the film – is to emphasize the intricacy of relations between the sexes nowadays. When ‘the gaze’ has been a prerogative of men in patriarchal societies for thousands of years, progress is slow to be made. I wanted The Gaze to reflect that and to offer a theatrically abstract glimpse into our challenging world of gender trouble.

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