Are the eyes the window to the soul, or a portal to the past?

After Another Earth (MIFF 2011), director Mike Cahill and actress Brit Marling spark a new existential scepticism-versus-spirituality debate, again exploring the immutability of faith in the absence of proof.

In I Origins, biologist Ian Gray (Michael Pitt) finds love in the gaze of beguiling beauty Sofi, until their opposites-attract connection ceases abruptly. Haunted by her memory, his research into the evolution of the human eye with partner Karen (Marling, Babylon, MIFF 2014; The East, MIFF 2013) triggers hope for a different ending to their romance.

Cahill's second consecutive effort to win the Sundance Film Festival's Alfred P Sloan Feature Film Prize for the innovative depiction of science in film, I Origins is "a bracingly venturesome, exploratory work that achieves an exceptional balance between the emotional and intellectual aspects of its unusual story" (Hollywood Reporter).