Based on a true story, the mysterious and fascinating life of a deaf, illiterate Idaho man now numbered among the 20th century's top American artists.

Gifted with an exceptional visual memory, James Castle drew nonstop: landscapes, houses, objects from his "uneventful" youth in Garden Valley and at a school for the deaf. Illiterate, but fascinated by writing and publishing, Castle also "wrote" strange, unreadable books he sometimes hid in walls, attics, and henhouses, where he often drew surrounded by cardboard puppets he called his "friends." His œuvre, which later came to light through one of his nephews, is an unexpected cross between the rural America of Dorothea Lange or Walker Evans and modern and contemporary art. It has had major shows at prominent museums and galleries in the U.S., Spain, England, and Japan, but not yet France.