Nine years ago, when I was a college sophomore, a homeless man approached me in a bar. He handed me a bundle of letters dating from 1964 and ’65. The stranger gave no details, and disappeared. Addressed to Harvard freshman Rob Shaw, the letters revealed a family crisis: Rob’s father was a prominent surgeon, diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. Ostracized, the man wrote his son asking for help in restoring his reputation. “Dear Rob…How nuts do they think I am?” From this bundle of letters springs the plot for an unusual movie: a search for the man to whom they belong, spurred on by a bizarre coincidence. One author of the letters later became famous as “Near Death-er” and conversion from atheist artist to Christian pastor. Stumbling upon him led me to trace the fractured past of Rob Shaw, a pioneer of Chaos Theory, a physics principle which says that seemingly insignificant variables (who was this homeless man and why did he give me the letters?) can magnify into great changes – an unlikely intergenerational relationship develops between filmmaker and subject. Strange Attractors: A Movie for Curious People is the visual voyage of these letters from their origin to the present. It pushes the value of allowing a chaotic element in your life, which breaks your standard pattern. Whether there’s an ultimate coherence in these lives is up to you to consider.