ABOUT THE PROJECT

LOGLINE
Faced with the threat of losing his eyesight, Mark Cousins explores the central role of looking in his own life, and in the past, present and future of humanity.

SYNOPSIS
Faced with the threat of going blind, Northern Irish filmmaker Mark Cousins (winner of the European Film Academy’s Innovation Award for Women Make Film, a Peabody Award for The Story of Film, and a special commendation at Cannes for The Eyes of Orson Welles) embarks on an imaginative odyssey from his own bed to explore the role that visual experience plays in our individual and collective lives.

In a deeply personal, intimate and dazzling meditation on the power of looking in his own life, he guides us through the riches of the visual world, through a kaleidoscope of imagery across cultures and eras, drawing on art history, biology, neuroscience, psychology, poetry and philosophy. As he goes under the surgeon’s knife to save his eyesight, he suggests that we are in the midst of a looking revolution more powerful than any which has gone before, which has the potential to change the world—for better or for worse.

At a time when we are more assailed by images than ever, when the value of looking is increasingly under question, he reveals how looking makes us who we are, lying at the heart of human experience, of empathy, discovery, and thought. He shares the pleasures of seeing the world, in all its complexity and contradiction, with eyes wide open. As the COVID-19 pandemic brings another dramatic shift of perspective, he reaches out to other lookers for their vision from lockdown. And in a startling final shift, he travels to the future to consider how his looking life will continue to develop until the very end.

PROJECT TYPE Documentary Feature

DIRECTOR Mark Cousins
PRODUCER Mary Bell, Adam Dawtrey