What We All Lack (dir. Maria Serralvo) presents a reflection on the male gaze and the female body inspired by the story of surrealist photographers Man Ray and Lee Miller.

While Man, an important artist, admires Lee’s beauty, she feels trapped in her role as muse and realizes she needs to escape. The film uses excerpts from the love letters Man Ray wrote to Lee Miller during their relationship in the 1930s in Paris. His restless and demanding speech is combined in this film with recreations of some of Ray’s portraits of Miller. She, posing in front of the camera for him and, consequently, for us, will turn her nudity, at first vulnerable, into her strength.

From a dreamlike, subtle and ambivalent space, What We All Lack invites us to question the mechanisms of the gaze on the female body and to think about the power dynamics hidden behind our own relationships.