Astrid

Astrid, Æstriðr, Aestrith, Ástríður, Estrid, or variants is a given name of Old Norse origin.

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Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey

Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey (born 26 May 1986) is a French-Spanish actress and model. She is best known for playing Suzanne in The Sea Wall, the mermaid Syrena in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and Sofi in I Origins. She is the recipient of the Prix Suzanne Bianchetti in 2009 and the Trophée Chopard Award for Female Revelation of the Year at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.

Life and career

Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey was born in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, to a Spanish father and a French-American mother. She is the eldest among three daughters. Following her parents' divorce when she was 2 years old, she moved to southwestern France at age 5. She was raised in a small town near La Rochelle, where she acted in school plays as a hobby, but never saw acting as a possible career path as the countryside where she lived was very different from the movie industry, describing how she thought acting was "not a profession; it was something abstract". Her father later moved to the Dominican Republic, where she spent five summers working as a waitress. At age 17, she moved to Paris by herself to pursue a career in Osteopathy, but found herself moving around a lot, without knowing anybody in the area. Shortly after, her father died at age 46. Due to the incident, she describes realizing that life is too short and that her true ambition was acting. After graduation, she went straight to drama school. She is fluent in French, Catalan, and Spanish, and in 2011 she also learned to speak English.

I Origins

I Origins is a 2014 American science fiction drama written and directed by Mike Cahill. The independent production premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival on January 18, 2014. It is distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures, and opened in limited release on July 18, 2014. It won the Best Feature Length Film Award at the Festival Internacional de Cinema Fantàstic de Catalunya on October 11, 2014.

Plot

A graduate student, Ian Gray, is researching the evolution of human eyes with Karen, his first year lab assistant, and Kenny. He has a particular hostility to superstition and "intelligent design", which he hopes to discredit by filling in the steps of the evolution of the eye. At a Halloween party he has an encounter with Sofi, who is wearing a mask. He photographs her eyes and they go into the washroom to have sex. Abruptly she leaves.

Ian continues thinking about her. One day coincidences seem to mysteriously guide him to a billboard displaying what he recognizes to be Sofi's eyes. Eventually he sees her on a train. They begin a relationship, although his rationalism clashes with her fey spirituality. One day they agree to marry. They are told they need to wait a day for a licence, and Ian gets a call from Karen at the lab. There has been a breakthrough in their research. She's found a blind worm — Eisenia fetida — with the DNA to develop an eye. Ian takes Sofi to the lab with him.