The Brooklyn Rail

In late August, I sat down with documentary filmmaker Lana Wilson at a café in Prospect Heights as she got ready for the New York City premiere of her latest feature, Look Into My Eyes. Following her high-profile Taylor Swift documentary Miss Americana (2020), her latest film’s world premiere at Sundance 2024 announced Wilson’s comeback to the big screen as she continues to explore similar themes of trauma, healing, and self-identity.

Away from the limelight of her previous celebrity projects, Wilson turns an intimate, in-depth lens onto seven New York psychics this time around. Panning along the city’s skyline at dusk, her opening shot gradually zooms into the psychics’ consulting rooms. Switching back and forth between the consulting sessions and their private home lives, the film has one clear throughline: psychic reading as mutual therapy between the psychics and their clients with shared grief and struggles.

We witness Black psychic Ilka Pinheiro tear up while trying to provide affirmation to a young Black man: he can simultaneously take pride in and break free from his late grandfather’s enslaved lineage. We also join Asian psychic Michael Kim, adopted by white parents, as he tells a fellow adoptee that her birth parents who abandoned her because of China’s One-child policy still think about her—but not so much that she shouldn’t move on.

I feel as if the film sees right through me, as I first sought out psychic readings to alleviate my depression and anxiety of being trapped in the United States during COVID—and possibly becoming the target of hate crimes as a Chinese woman. Having survived an abusive partner who took advantage of my vulnerable state during that same time, I’m still healing by using different forms of spirituality to get my power and myself back.

With the film’s theatrical release in September and its digital release this month, Wilson shared with me what she has learned from psychic reading and what she wants the audience to learn about psychic reading. We also agreed upon what we as humans universally want regardless of fame or anonymity: to not feel alone in our pain, to have what we deserve—and that everything is going to be okay.

Weiting Liu (Rail): Look into My Eyes deeply resonates with me as I’ve developed a close relationship with spirituality to overcome a multitude of intersectional traumas during and in the aftermath of the COVID years. I know that you had your first close encounter with psychic reading right after Trump got elected president. And you eventually launched this project with the onset of COVID. What have these personal and professional experiences with psychic reading been like?

Lana Wilson: I, like so many people around the world, felt devastated by the news of Trump’s election. The morning after election night in 2016, I found myself standing in a desolate strip mall in Atlantic City, New Jersey, uncertain of how my own life and the world itself would move forward. And then one storefront caught my eye, lit up with a “$5 Psychic Reading” neon sign.

With a mix of horror and embarrassment, I stepped inside for what would end up as my first psychic reading. As soon as I opened the curtains and sat down at the table across from the psychic, I felt all my senses rushing back to me. I could suddenly identify my heartbreak with a grounding sense of vulnerability. We carried out an intimate one-on-one about my fear and angst, and I ended our talk feeling comforted and a bit more hopeful.

As I was getting up to leave, the psychic asked me what I did for a living. I told her I was a documentary filmmaker working on a project about a self-destructive Buddhist monk who counsels suicidal people to feel everyone else’s pains inflicted on himself (The Departure [2017]). She simply responded, “This is exactly what I do.” That was the moment when I first realized the serious potential of having psychics as my next subjects.

In 2018, I was ready to start the psychic project when Netflix called me about making a Taylor Swift documentary. So I dropped everything else for Miss Americana. Then I moved back to New York City the following year right before COVID started. A couple of weeks into lockdown, I realized it was finally the right time for this project—everyone’s isolation and despair must have made psychics busier than ever. Basically, the project kept coming back to me in times of global collective traumas.

Rail: Other than the global collective traumas to be healed, most of the psychics in the film are queer and/or racial minorities who share very specific traumas with their clients from similar backgrounds. How did you find them? And did you get to witness their therapeutic powers firsthand while making the film?

Wilson: My team and I started out doing readings with all kinds of psychics around New York City. Some of the storefront operators predicted the future in banal ways, while others charged ridiculously high prices for the short, dry sessions they offered.

I soon found myself gravitating towards the ones who offer long, intimate sessions out of their apartments and little rental spaces. Psychic reading is a calling and passion for those who have day jobs. So some of them even provide their services for free. The psychics who wound up in the film prioritize helping those in need—while finding their own communities and connections to help themselves get through past traumas and hard times.

One of the psychics in the film, Nikenya Hall, used to be a licensed therapist and loved helping people with talk therapy. But she would also feel unfulfilled because she couldn’t integrate her vibrant personality, Black identity, and spiritual knowledge into the profession. She also pointed out to me that psychoanalysis was a white male invention. And the current professional space of talk therapy in New York City remains predominantly white and largely inaccessible to less financially privileged communities.

Rail: Are there any other things that traditional therapy can’t do but psychic reading can?

Wilson: Having finished making the film, I would define psychic reading as a religious belief system rather than a form of therapy. Most of the time, clients come into sessions desperately in need of some guidance from a higher power. But neither belief nor disbelief really matters in a reading session. It’s more about the clients’ unique emotional experiences getting validated—and some of the less fortunate ones rediscovering their purpose in life despite their sufferings.

I imagine some audiences would walk into the film with skepticism—there are apparent stigmas associated with psychic reading. In the film’s first half, I make sure to show both the magical moments during the sessions and when the psychics botch their readings and predictions. Then the second half moves past the skepticism and focuses on the empathy shared by the psychics and clients alike, who are all trying to find some light and solace in this world filled with cruelty, inequality, and things that just don’t make sense.

Rail: The film opens with a heart-wrenching session where a middle-aged doctor tries to keep her composure recounting a brutally traumatic experience: while she was still a newbie working an ER shift, a little girl was sent in after getting shot in the head, pronounced dead on arrival. Decades later, she’s still looking for an answer if the girl is okay now.

Grief prevails among both the psychics and their clients. I think this is another thing psychic reading could be more efficient at tackling—what if people just want to know that their loved ones who are no longer in this physical realm are doing okay?

Wilson: What you’re saying reminds me of what psychic reading can do more than even religion. One of the psychics, Eugene Grygo, was raised in a conservative Catholic environment. But he then realized he’s gay and left the religion which held no safe space for his true self. Reading sessions have since become his safe space to process grief over his brother’s death.

The film’s biggest thematic and technical inspiration is Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 1998 film After Life, where a way station exists as a limbo space between the realms of life and death. While After Life’s characters temporarily go back into life, the people in my film reach out to the dead—all just trying to hold onto someone or something dear to their hearts. How can you be cynical and skeptical about something as pure and real as this?

Rail: Talking about the film’s technical aspects, I want to sing some praises here. In a profoundly humane, cast-driven documentary, it can sometimes feel that the editing and cinematography has taken a backseat. But I love how respectfully your camera moves and how patiently you put together all the footage. How do you and your team achieve this balanced sense of melancholy and comfort?

Wilson: After Life doesn’t reveal its main character until eighteen minutes into the runtime. In my film, only after twenty minutes into the story do we leave the confines of the consulting room to go home with one of the psychics. At the film’s midpoint, there’s also a pivotal moment where the tables are turned, and the roles of the psychic and the client become reversed. I want to deliver a definitive message that the psychics and the clients are essentially the same and they heal each other. I never intended for the film to have a linear triptych structure with a beginning, middle, and end.

This is the hardest film I’ve ever edited just because of how much footage we shot. I fortunately got to work with the immensely capable editor Hannah Buck who edited in 2021 after I shot most of the sessions, and then came back in 2023 to edit the rest. During the prolonged process, one thing we reiterated with each other is to create a cumulative viewing experience for the audience: the emotions of one scene must pour into the next to eventually form a slow burn where all the people become one whole entity on screen.

Getting to the nitty-gritty of how we filmed the footage, I’m blessed with the help of the perceptively precise cinematographer Stephen Maing. I’ve always wanted the film to have an arthouse look of austerity and neutrality as opposed to a slick reality TV show look. An instant match, Stephen has extensive experience in naturalistic documentary filmmaking and an eagle eye for formal compositions. And a special thing we did when filming the sessions was to shoot the clients with unmanned cameras focused from another room. As the clients would not see anyone else other than the psychics, we were able to capture them in their most open states.

Rail: This is a fundamentally self-reflexive film, which breaks the fourth wall a couple of times, including the piercing ending where Eugene sings directly to the camera in a close-up, “You’re the only ones who know,” a lyric from the song “Only Ones Who Know.” What are the parallels between the act of psychic reading and your process of making the film? What kind of relationship do you want the audience to form with the film?

Wilson: With that ending, I want to directly address the audience to let them in on the psychics’ artificial constructions of the film. It’s no coincidence that all seven psychics are also actors, artists, and/or performers. They’re not only the subjects but also the creators of the film. I want the audience to leave the film understanding the gray area where something can be contrived and real at the same time.

The film has become a reflection of my own life and work as a documentary director. The dynamic of me interviewing a subject isn’t much different from a psychic reading. Are two people sitting at a table actually summoning a ghost, or are they having a creative collaboration of make-believe? Is cinema any different? In the end, they both strip down to basic human connection.