Icarus Films
Since 1978, Icarus Films has been a leading distributor of documentary films in North America. Led by longtime president Jonathan Miller, we work with independent producers worldwide to release 30-50 new films a year, and represent a collection of well over 1,000 titles.
Each year we release six to eight feature documentaries to theatrical audiences. We've recently released films including the Brazilian documentary In the Intense Now, the Serbian documentary The Other Side of Everything and, as a co-release with KimStim, the fiction feature film from Indonesia, Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts.
In 2012, Icarus Films acquired The dGenerate Films Collection, the leading source for contemporary, independent films from mainland China. Our recent releases from this collection including Wang Bing's 'Til Madness Do Us Part, Bitter Money and the forthcoming co-release with Grashopper Film, Dead Souls.
We are also proud to have partnered with Bullfrog Films and established Docuseek, which offers a subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service focused on meeting the needs of colleges and universities for online access to essential documentary content. Currently Docuseek has over 1400 titles available, of which 550 come from the Icarus Films collection.
After 40 years in business, Icarus Films is proud to be active in traditional and new media, and to work with new talent as well as “old masters.” We value meeting the needs of activists, educators, and service providers, as well as challenging audiences, and programmers, with original creative works.
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The Poets
Directed by Chivas DeVinck • Documentary • 2018 • 99 minutes
Syl Cheney-Coker (author of The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize) and Niyi Osundare (recipient of the Nigerian National Merit Award, Nigeria’s highest recognition for distinguished academic an...
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The Point of Least Resistance
Directed by Peter Fischli & David Weiss • Drama • 1981 • 29 minutes
THE POINT OF LEAST RESISTANCE is Fischli and Weiss' first film together. A rat and a bear are out to make a lot of money in the Los Angeles art world. So when they find a corpse in a gallery, hoping it will be the means to enter...
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The Punishment
Directed by Jean Rouch • Documentary • 1962 • 64 minutes
An aimless young woman is sent home from school with nothing to do. Drifting through the streets of Paris, she comes across a variety of people.
"Extraordinary and extraordinarily rare movie about public misogyny."—Richard Brody, The New ...
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The Questioning
Directed by Zhu Rikun • Documentary • 2013 • 21 minutes
'Early in the morning on July 24th, 2012, after meeting some friends in Hongkong, I drove a car of my brother back to Shenzhen and got Guo Feixiong and three other friends who take part in human rights protection to the car and went on driv...
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The Red Soul
Directed by Jessica Gorter • Documentary • 2017 • 90 minutes
The Red Soul lays bare the Russian psyche of today and shows a world full of contradictions. In a country where hardly any family escaped the hunger, fear and violence resulting from Stalin’s reign of terror, no one has ever been convi...
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The Right Way
Directed by Peter Fischli & David Weiss • Drama • 1983 • 55 minutes
In THE RIGHT WAY, friendship is once again put to the test as rat and bear go hiking in the open, as-it-were unspoiled countryside, at the mercy of the elements and all kinds of miracles - and, above all, at the mercy of themsel...
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The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger
Directed by Bartek Dziadosz, Colin MacCabe, Christopher Roth and Tilda Swinton • Documentary • With John Berger, Tilda Swinton • 2015 • 90 minutes
Prolific artist, philosopher, writer, storyteller and 'radical humanist' John Berger is the focus of this vivid four-part cinematic portrait. In 1973...
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The Silence of Mark Rothko
Directed by Marjoleine Boonstra • Documentary • 2014 • 52 minutes
'He wanted the viewer to step into the painting. What he aimed for was not a consumption of art, but a dialogue. He thought that art could transform the public.' -Annie Cohen-Solal, Mark Rothko biographer Painter Mark Rothko is be...
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The Sixth Side of the Pentagon
Directed by Chris Marker & François Reichenbach • Documentary • 1967 • 26 minutes
"If the five sides of the pentagon appear impregnable, attack the sixth side."— Zen proverb
On October 21, 1967, over 100,000 protestors gathered in Washington, D.C., for the Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam...
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The Spectre of Hope
Directed by Paul Carlin • Documentary • With John Berger, Sebastiao Salgado • 2001 • 52 minutes
Over the past 30 years Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado's work has won every major award for excellence. More importantly, his photographs have had an actual impact on the world and how it is ...
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Stories of A
Directed by Charles Belmont and Marielle Issartel • Documentary • 1973 • 89 minutes
Shot in Paris in 1973, this feminist film on the fight for abortion rights was banned as soon it was released. A large-scale game of hide-and-seek ensued, as activists created an underground distribution network,...
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The Tiniest Place
Directed by Tatiana Huezo • Documentary • 2011 • 104 minutes
On the surface THE TINIEST PLACE is the story of Cinquera, a village literally wiped off the official map during El Salvador's 12-year civil war. But on a deeper level it is a story about the ability to rise, to rebuild and reinvent on...
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The Two Faces of a Bamileke Woman
Directed by Rosine Mbakam • Documentary • 2016 • 76 minutes
Rosine Mbakam left Cameroon at 27 to live in Belgium. Seven years later—having studied film and married a European—she returns to make what she calls a journey into darkness—to the village of her birth, and later to the capital city of ...
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The Underground Orchestra
Directed by Heddy Honigmann • Documentary • 1999 • 108 minutes
THE UNDERGROUND ORCHESTRA is a glorious documentary profile of musicians who play on the sidewalks of Paris and in the Metro. Filmmaker Heddy Honigmann (METAL AND MELANCHOLY and O AMOR NATURAL), illuminates the lives and music of a r...
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The Way Things Go
Directed by Peter Fischli & David Weiss • Documentary • 1987 • 30 minutes
Inside a warehouse, Swiss artists Peter Fischli (b. 1952) and David Weiss (1946—2012) built an enormous, precarious structure 100 feet long made out of common household items—tea kettles, tires, old shoes, balloons, wooden...
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The Wealth of Nations: A New Gospel?
Directed by Ilan Ziv • Documentary • 2014 • 53 minutes
Adam Smith published two books in his life. The Wealth of Nations is a global bestseller that has never been out of print, while The Theory of Moral Sentiments is largely forgotten.
This episode of CAPITALISM argues that disconnecting Smit...
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The Widowed Witch
Directed by Cai Chengjie • Drama • With Tian Tian, Gao Pengcheng, Wang Qilin, Shuyan Feng • 2018 • 120 minutes
Winner of the top prize at the Rotterdam Film Festival, director Cai Chengjie’s debut feature is, like its titular protagonist, unexpectedly powerful and fiercely unpredictable.
Deemed...
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The Written Face
Directed by Daniel Schmid • Documentary • With Tamasaburo Bando • 1999 • 89 minutes
In Japanese theater women's roles are traditionally played by men. The man playing the woman's role, the Onnagata, does not imitate the woman, as in the West, but tries to capture her significance. He need not st...
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They Are We
Directed by Emma Christopher, Ph.D. • Documentary • 2014 • 79 minutes
THEY ARE WE is the story of a remarkable reunion, 170 or so years after a family was driven apart by the ravages of the transatlantic slave trade. In Central Cuba, proud members of the Ganga-Longoba, a small Afro-Cuban ethnic ...
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Tierralismo
Directed by Alejandro Ramirez Anderson • Documentary • 2013 • 49 minutes
On the outskirts of Havana, sandwiched between highways and public housing, a revolution is taking place. Here, in the district of Alamar, a 26-acre farming co-op provides employment for dozens of workers, while producing v...
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Time of Pandemics
Directed by Rehad Desai • Documentary • 2023 • 87 minutes
By the time COVID-19 appeared, South African filmmaker Rehad Desai was all-too-familiar with pandemics. Not only had he previously worked in HIV prevention, he was also in the midst of making a film about a clinical trial for a vaccine th...
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Time Thieves
Directed by Cosima Dannoritzer • Documentary • 2018 • 85 minutes
Who hasn’t come across the situation where an airline has us printing our own boarding passes and checking in our own luggage, saving the company a fortune in working hours? Who hasn’t spent hours assembling a piece of furniture, o...
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To Be Seen
Directed by Alice Arnold • Documentary • 2005 • 30 minutes
TO BE SEEN is a study of visual culture, of urban culture and an exploration of an age-old urban cultural phenomenon, street art.
The subculture of street art is significant because it is an embodiment of subversive content, which is r...
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To Chris Marker, An Unsent Letter
Directed by Emiko Omori • Documentary • 2013 • 78 minutes
TO CHRIS MARKER, AN UNSENT LETTER is a cinematic love letter to Chris Marker, the notoriously private filmmaker and artist--director of LA JETEE, SANS SOLEIL, LE JOLI MAI and many other films, and self-described "best known author of unkn...
