A spirited, witty essay on the psychoanalytic project, Empathy centers around a series of extended interviews conducted by Siegel with a group of older male psychoanalysts and designed to deconstruct the power structure of the analyst and analysant relationship. Making a memorable detour into the psychoanalytic dimensions of the modernist architecture and design that has become part of the fabric of the everyday in the U.S., Siegel’s film eventually folds in upon itself, asking if the relationship between camera and subject is not itself fraught with deep psycho-sexual biases.

The fascination with architecture and the urban experience that informs the structure and style of Siegel’s films finds its apotheosis in her alternately lyrically arresting and disquieting study of scopophilia and the cinematic imagination. Shot entirely at night in Siegel’s native Chicago, The Sleepers captures fleeting and obscure moments in the lives of strangers, glimpsed at a distance through the windows of neighboring apartment buildings. While watching the mysterious activity of the anonymous urbanites, a free-association Rear Window is released in the mind of the viewer who has been trained by the cinema to search for intrigue at the furthest edges of the frame.