The realms of classical music and outsider art merge in this elegant behind-the-scenes portrait of Swiss composer Heinz Holliger's two-year endeavor to compose a musical homage to 1920s painter and musician Louis Soutter. A violin soloist in the Geneva Orchestra, Soutter was kicked out for “playing to his celestial voices”; later committed to a sanitarium (a favored destination for Swiss rebel geniuses, the film ruefully points out), he turned his attention to art, and created over 4,000 intricately claustrophobic paintings in the twenty years before he died. Arguably the most politically engaged Swiss composer of his generation, Holliger views music as a way “to decipher what those on the brink of despair have to tell us.” Ombres connects these two remarkable artists, lingering as long on Soutter's haunting images as on Holliger's remarkable ability to make the art and reason of music composition not only clear, but politically relevant.