He was a mathematician, engineer, and architect, active in the communist underground, and fought in the civil war in Greece, where he was wounded. He escaped to France using an alias and was sentenced to death in absentia. But Iannis Xenakis was also a talented, innovative composer and a pioneer of electronic music. He didn’t study music, and when he decided to pursue it seriously, at age 28, he got help from some of the great French composers of his time, including Olivier Messiaen who encouraged him to defy musical norms.

This film tries to understand – and convey through cinema – how Xenakis applied math, probability, and the laws of nature and science to composing music. The film provides an extraordinary opportunity to enter the mind of a mathematician, architect (and assistant to Le Corbusier), and artist who created a language that blended these loves.