Arthur C. Clarke, author of sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, once quipped that “Magic’s just science that we don’t understand yet.” In our quest for answers, scientists and dreamers alike have remained committed to gathering facts and figures for that which we can’t explain, hoping to travel beyond the limits of our imagination. But at the heart of this number crunching and theorizing is an intangible human element called hope. It drives us to fumble in the darkness until we find the light. 

It’s this compulsion that lives at the heart of A Wrinkle In Time, Ava DuVernay’s visionary adaptation of the novel by Madeleine L’Engle where a young girl named Meg Murry pushes the limits of science with the power of love in hopes of reuniting with her astrophysicist father, who is somewhere on the other side of the universe. 

The film stars Storm Reid, Chris Pine, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Mindy Kaling, Reese Witherspoon and Oprah Winfrey, who band together to combat the darkness and blur the line between science and magic with every decision. But what is that line?

“Best question of the day,” says Chris Pine, who plays Dr. Alex Murry. “I like this idea of awe, like being in awe. I think there is some magic that shouldn’t be explained by science.”

“For me it’s the everyday miracle of life,” says Oprah Winfrey, the preternatural Mrs. Which. “I think about this a lot, that your heart has been pumping since the day you were born, and it’s never stopped. And I think obviously there’s biology and science to that,  but I also think that there’s something mysterious,  an unexplainable, and magical about that.”

The films star, Storm Reid, thinks there is a symbiotic relationship between the concepts, recognizing the similarities, but director Ava DuVernay really brings it home breaking down the science of Black Girl Magic. 

“Oh yeah, [there is] definitely a science to Black Girl Magic. A part of it is our legacy, you know, our ancestry, it’s in our bones, it’s in our DNA, survival. Perseverance, you know? They say you can’t have food, we’re throwing out this part of the pig, we’ll make it into something that we like called chitlins. They say you can’t go to our colleges, okay well we’ll make HBCU’s. So that’s all the magic within black people, our survival.”

Watch the full video above.