GERMAN DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER MO Asumang jokes that she has always been drawn to controversial subjects. A consummate interviewer, Asumang honed her skills from 1997 to 2000 as the moderator of the Pro7 cable television sex-talk show “Liebe Sunde” (Dear Sin/Love Sin—there is a double meaning here in German). However, even she did not expect to become the target of a death threat by a right-wing “Hate Rock” band. Although she had previously experienced both verbal and physical abuse from racists, as she told an interviewer for the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel in 2016, having the neo-Nazi band White Aryan Rebels call for her execution in the song “Diese Kugel ist fur dich!” (This bullet is for you!) was a new experience for her. In her 2016 autobiography Mo und die Arier: Allein unter Rassisten und Neonazis (Mo and the Aryans: Alone Among Racists and Neo-Nazis), Asumang details the paralyzing effect of hearing the lyric “Diese Kugel ist fur dich, Mo Asumang!” Recognizing that racists rarely know anyone from the groups they hate, she decided that she needed to meet some neo-Nazis in order to try to understand what lay hidden behind their mask of hatred. But instead of openly judging or condemning neo-Nazis, skinheads, and members of the Ku Klux Klan, among other racists, Asumang employs open communication, dialogue, and the tender gaze as her primary strategies of engagement.

In theorizing the tender gaze, Muriel Cormican explicitly frames this positionality as one that sidesteps objectification and visual pleasure in fiction film. My use of the term here, however, inserts it into a somewhat different arena, as I apply the concept of an empathetic, gentle gaze within the framework of the nonfiction film. I argue that, in her film Die Arier (The Aryans, 2014), Asumang employs the tender gaze on two levels: first, in her on-screen persona with her interlocutors, and second, as the filmmaker through whose eyes the spectator views the onscreen interaction. Asumang's iteration of the tender gaze emerges in the ways in which she interacts with her subjects from her positions both in front of and behind the camera.