Sight Leak addresses the tension between visibility and normativity based on notes by Roland Barthes. On a visit to China in 1973, the French philosopher was forbidden of seeing anything other than the country's official version. The “discursive wall” that separated Barthes from the Chinese compelled him to vision. Thus, the camera follows the silent gaze of the foreigner as he walks through a city, capturing fleeting encounters and fragments of text that speak of the restrictions of the visibility regime of the Chinese political system. The film takes place between the lines, when it allows us to glimpse the impasses and ambiguities of the desiring gaze amidst the troubled Chinese social context, in which the perspective of class struggle predominated.
