Healers Who Need Healing: Wilson ’05 Directs Look Into My Eyes
“I’d completely misunderstood the psychic tradition,” Emmy-winning writer and filmmaker Lana Wilson ’05 admitted. “I had trivialized it in a way. But it’s an extraordinary space for human connection.”
The morning after the 2016 presidential election, Wilson found herself in an unlikely position: seated across from a psychic, trying to make sense of the feelings of loss and disorientation that overwhelmed her. Wilson had been a lifelong skeptic, but a sudden urge overtook her when she spotted the advertisement for a reading just a few blocks away from her hotel. She was drawn into what she ultimately considers a transformative experience. “It was like looking in a mirror at my own internal self . . . like I could see my own vulnerability and desperation,” Wilson told an audience in the Goldsmith Family Cinema.
On November 12, 2024, Wilson returned to campus to screen her latest documentary, Look Into My Eyes, as part of the WesDocs series. The film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year to critical acclaim by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Rolling Stone, invites audiences into the intimate and unexpected world of psychic readings—not to question their validity, but to explore the humanity and vulnerability behind them.
After that fateful morning in November 2016, Wilson thought: “Wouldn’t it be interesting to have a film that could see this wash of humanity come through these doors and hear their questions and hear what comes out of this space?” But this idea was put on hold for some time, as Wilson released several documentaries, including The Departure, released in 2017. The film follows a punk-turned-priest in Japan as it explores the question of what makes life worth living. It was nominated for the 2018 Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary and hailed for being “a work of art” by The San Francisco Chronicle.
She then debuted Miss Americana at Sundance in 2020, which was named one of the five best documentaries of the year by the National Board of Review. Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields premiered at Sundance in 2023. It was a New York Times Critic’s Pick and broke viewership records when it launched globally on Hulu and Disney+. Still, amid her impressive slate of films, Wilson found herself drawn back to the story of these psychics—individuals whose extraordinary gift for connection felt especially profound during the isolation of the 2020 lockdown, when she first began laying the groundwork for this project.
Beginning with a series of vignettes featuring customers visiting psychics in New York City, Look Into My Eyes immediately delves into the painful stories of the psychics’ customers. Each individual shares their story, revealing their innermost pains, anxieties, and fears, and asks the psychic to connect with someone on their behalf. But as the film progresses, the focus subtly shifts: The psychics themselves become the central characters, the ones who absorb and carry the pain of their clients. Look Into My Eyes is less concerned with whether psychic readings are “real” and more focused on the human connection forged in these encounters. It asks a deeper question: What happens when you seek solace from strangers?
In a Q&A following the Wesleyan screening, Wilson spoke candidly about the three-year filmmaking process, describing how she gravitated to her chosen group of seven psychics—“I wanted people who were deeply sincere about what they did, but also questioning it,” she said—and how she navigated the inherently invasive nature of filming such deeply personal moments, keeping clients open and vulnerable even with the cameras zoomed close to their faces. Students deeply connected with Wilson’s work, with many tearing up during the final scenes.
Ultimately, Look Into My Eyes is a testament to the extraordinary power of vulnerability—both in seeking connection and in offering it. As the final scenes linger in the minds of the audience, Wilson leaves them with an invitation: not to believe in the psychic arts, but to reflect on the spaces we create to share our fears, our hopes, and our humanity. In doing so, she reminds us that the answers we seek may not lie in certainty but in the courage to embrace the questions, the experiences, and the people we encounter along the way
