Origami may seem an unlikely medium for understanding and explaining the world. But around the world fine artists and theoretical scientists are abandoning more conventional career paths to forge lives as modern-day paper folders.

Through the art of origami, these offbeat and provocative minds are reshaping ideas of creativity and revealing the relationship between art and science.

This documentary film chronicles 10 of their stories. The film features interviews with and insights into the practice of these intrepid paper folders, Between the Folds opens with three of the world’s foremost origami artists: a former sculptor in France who folds caricatures in paper rivaling the figures of Daumier and Picasso; a hyper-realist who walked away from a successful physics career to challenge the physics of a folded square instead; and an artisanal papermaker who folds impressionistic creations from the very same medium he makes from scratch.

Between the Folds then moves to less conventional artists, exploring concepts of minimalism, deconstruction, process and empiricism. Abstract artists emerge with a greater emphasis on concept, chopping at the fundamental roots of realism, which have long dominated traditional origami. The film also features advanced mathematicians and a remarkable scientist who received a MacArthur Genius Award for his computational origami research.

While debates ebb and flow on issues of folding technique, symbolism and purpose, this unique film shows how closely art and science are intertwined. The medium of paper folding—a simple blank, uncut square—emerges as a resounding metaphor for the creative potential for transformation in all of us.