For critical thinkers and cynical stinkers, ORIGIN is a film that sustains interest by intelligence, imagination and ideas.

Written and directed by Academy Award nominee Ava DuVernay, inspired by the New York Times best-seller Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, ORIGIN explores the mystery of history, the wonders of romance and a fight for the future of us all.

ORIGIN chronicles the tragedy and triumph of Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson as she investigates a global phenomenon of epic proportions. Portrayed by Academy Award nominee Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Isabel experiences palpable personal loss and peerless, sustaining love as she crosses continents and cultures to explore the nature of caste, the bedrock of racism and sexism and the end game of endogamy, the cultural practice of mating within a specific social, religious or ethnic group, rejecting any from outside of the group or belief structure as unsuitable for marriage or other close personal relationships.

Humans are capable of great empathy and of horrifying callousness, cruelty and violence. This dichotomy is a remnant of our evolution within our group or caste, our empathy largely limited to our own tribe and territorial rites, our violence reserved for competitors or traitors.

Charting the slave trade, the American Civil War, Southern States policy of segregation, the rise of Nazism, and the indiscriminate killing of African Americans in the modern age, ORIGIN seeks to elevate the academic to the practical in plain-speak and dramatic re-enactment.

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor plays Isabel with a steely, academic rigour, while Jon Bernthal is hunky dory as her super supportive hubby.

In the current climate of tribal unrest in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and really, the rest of the world with war, populist political posturing and a cruel and callous cancel culture, ORIGIN is a film that will stir discussion, create comment, and augment argument.

A welcome conversation.