Heaven Will Wait was born from a personal and urgent place. Over the past years, several women close to me, including myself, experienced sexual violence, from assault to rape. In the conversations that followed, I was struck by the often contradictory traces these experiences left in our bodies, our self-image, and the ways we relate to the world.

After many conversations on this topic, what intrigued me most were the ambiguities in our behaviour and the tension between freedom and constraint. My friends and I continued to present ourselves as confident, sexy, provocative - something I admired, but no longer fully understood. At times, it even felt unethical, as if we were taking part in the dynamic that hurt us. One moment, I wanted to let go: to flirt, to feel, to reclaim desire. The next, that impulse felt hollow and painful. Was this empowerment, or simply an attempt to regain control? Were we truly reclaiming our sexuality, or performing for a gaze we had internalised so deeply it felt like our own?

This inner conflict became the starting point for the film. From the outset, I knew it needed to live between forms: the rawness of documentary and the dreamlike textures of fiction - capturing what is lived and what is felt, what is spoken and what remains unsaid. I wanted my friends and I to play ourselves, grounding the film in our surroundings while blurring observer and participant, objective and subjective, reality and perception. Through a lens that alternates between voyeuristic distance and intimate closeness, we invite the viewer to observe the group at the same time as becoming part of it.

At its core, Heaven will wait explores the friction between sexual autonomy and objectification: how the desire for self-determination is shaped, and often distorted, by a gaze that reduces us to objects. We long to be free in our desires, yet remain acutely aware of being watched. We want to resist sexualization, yet sometimes still crave the validation it brings.

The film also grapples with the normalisation of trauma. Within my circle, stories of sexual violence are often shared casually, even humorously. Does that lightness help break stigma, or does it normalise the violence itself?

Heaven Will Wait is not a story of conventional victimhood. It aims to explore the ambiguity of female sexuality without judgment or simplification.