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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Be Seeing You
Directed by Mario Marret, Chris Marker • Documentary • 1968 • 39 minutes
From 1967 to 1976 Chris Marker was a member of SLON (the 'Company for the Launching of New Works'), a group based on the idea that cinema should not be thought of solely in terms of commerce. 1967 was also the year an impor...
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Between Two-Spirit
Directed by Laurence Perigaud • Documentary • 2012 • 76 minutes
Chris feels neither man nor woman, but more like a 'Two-Spirit' in between genders. Now turning sixty, this professor of management is taking the big plunge. This sensitive film follows one eventful year in Chris Muth's life, from a...
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Beyond My Grandfather Allende
Directed by Marcia Tambutti Allende • Documentary • 2015 • 98 minutes
More than 40 years have passed since a military coup in Chile deposed the democratically elected government of President Salvador Allende. The death of Allende and the years of military dictatorship that followed have left dee...
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Black Is the Color: A History of African American Art
Directed by Jacques Goldstein • Documentary • 2017 • 52 minutes
In 1969, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York mounted a major exhibit called “Harlem On My Mind.” There was just one thing wrong: the show had no work by African-American artists.
The “Harlem on My Mind” fiasco is emblematic ...
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Bones of Contention
Directed by Andrea Weiss • Documentary • With Laura Garcia Lorca, Emilio Silva, Antoni Ruiz, Silvia Reyes, Isabel Franc, Empar Pineda, Fernando Valverde • 2017 • 75 minutes
BONES OF CONTENTION is the first nonfiction feature film to explore the theme of historical memory in Spain, focusing on th...
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The Botanical Avatar of Mademoiselle Flora
Directed by Jeanne Barbillon • Drama • With Bernadette Lafont, Louis Mesuret • 1965 • 15 minutes
In a small French town, Flora (Bernadette Lafont) has a six-week fling with a soldier. But this is no passionate affair. Her lover, the cartoonish Charles (Louis Mesuret), ignores her advances, insis...
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Branding Illness
Directed by Anne Georget • Documentary • 2011 • 52 minutes
A woman in the grip of pre-menstrual dysphoric disease slams grocery carts outside a supermarket in frustration. A concerned young Japanese woman asks her husband if he has ever been happy. Peppy actors in lab coats reassure the audience...
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Chantal Akerman by Chantal Akerman
Directed by Chantal Akerman • Documentary • 1996 • 64 minutes
When asked to participate in the Cinema, of Our Time series, Chantal Akerman jokingly suggested herself as subject matter. She envisioned a film consisting solely of excerpts from her films, but when pressed by the producers to includ...
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Chez Jolie Coiffure
Directed by Rosine Mbakam • Documentary • 2018 • 70 minutes
Sabine attaches a hair weave and gets to work. Her hands move quickly and precisely, as she tightly braids the hair in front of the sign in her salon promising African, European, and American-style coiffure. Sabine is a larger than-life...
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Cholesterol, the Great Bluff
Directed by Anne Georget • Documentary • 2016 • 82 minutes
For more than six decades, doctors, nutritionists, and public health officials have been waging a war against high cholesterol in an effort to fight heart disease. It’s a war that has seen the demonization of saturated fats, the rise and...
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Chicago Boys
Directed by Carola Fuentes and Rafael Valdeavellano • Documentary • 2015 • 85 minutes
In the middle of the Cold War, the University of Chicago gave scholarships to a group of Chilean students to study economics under the teachings of Milton Friedman. Twenty years later, during Pinochet's dictato...
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Cinema Novo
Directed by Eryk Rocha • Documentary • 2016 • 90 minutes
CINEMA NOVO is a film essay that poetically investigates the eponimous Brazilian film movement, the most prominent in Latin America in the past century, through the analysis of its main auteurs: Nelson Pereira do Santos, Glauber Rocha, Leo...
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Class of Struggle
Directed by The Medvedkin Group • Documentary • 1969 • 37 minutes
In 1967, Chris Marker and Mario Marret (under the aegis of SLON) produced A BIENTOT J'ESPERE , which documented a strike and factory occupation-the first in France since 1936-by textile workers at the Rhodiaceta textile plant in B...
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Codigo Color, Memorias
Directed by William Sabourin O'Reilly • Documentary • 2015 • 30 minutes
CODIGO COLOR, MEMORIAS (COLOR CODE, MEMORIES), explores the complex issue of racism through the memories of the picturesque city of Santiago de Cuba.
CODIGO COLOR was initially made for Cuban youth who are unfamiliar with t...
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Community of Praise
Directed by Richard Leacock and Marisa Silver • Documentary • 1982 • 60 minutes
Part of the acclaimed Middletown series.
COMMUNITY OF PRAISE examines faith at work in the lives of a family. Their fundamentalist beliefs shape their encounters with the emergencies and the ordinary problems of dai...
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Congo: The Doctor Who Saves Women
Directed by Angele Diabang • Documentary • 2014 • 52 minutes
Dr. Denis Mukwege, the winner of the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize, is a gynecologist and the founder of Panzi, a hospital whose primary mission is treating women who have been raped - casualties in the Democratic Republic of Congo's decades-...
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Conversations with Roy DeCarava
Directed by Carroll Parrot Blue • Documentary • 1984 • 28 minutes
'It starts before you snap the shutter... It starts with your sense of what's important.' These are the words of Roy DeCarava, one of the foremost photographic artists of the twentieth century, contributor to the Family of Man exh...
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Cul de Sac: A Suburban War Story
Directed by Garrett Scott • Documentary • 2001 • 57 minutes
In May 1995, Shawn Nelson, a 35 year-old plumber from Clairemont, California, emerged from an eighteen foot mine shaft he had dug beneath his backyard in search for gold. An ex-soldier and methamphetamine abuser, he stole a tank from a ...
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CultureJam
Directed by Jill Sharpe • Documentary • 2001 • 52 minutes
A new breed of revolutionary stands poised along our information highways waging war on logos and symbols. They're 'Culture Jammers,' and their mission is to artfully reclaim our mental environment by causing a bit of brand damage to corp...
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Dam/Age
Directed by Aradhana Seth • Documentary • 2002 • 50 minutes
"I suddenly realized… I command the space to raise a dissenting voice, and if I don't do it, it's as political an act as doing it… to stay quiet is as political an act as speaking out."- Arundhati Roy, Author of Booker Prize Winner The ...
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Damages
Directed by Thomas Balmes • Documentary • 2008 • 69 minutes
In the United States, when someone dies as a result of the negligence or liability of another person-medical malpractice, a highway accident, murder-a wrongful death lawsuit, seeking monetary damages for the loss of financial or emotion...
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Dark Star: H. R. Giger's World
Directed by Belinda Sallin • Documentary • 2014 • 95 minutes
Surrealist artist H. R. Giger (1940–2014) terrified audiences with his Oscar-winning monsters in Ridley Scott's ALIEN. Sci-fi, horror, music, album covers, tattoos and fetish art have been influenced by his dark, intricate paintings an...
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Dear Dr. Spencer
Directed by Danielle Renfrew & Beth Seltzer • Documentary • With Lili Taylor • 1998 • 25 minutes
From the early 1920s until his death in 1969, Dr. Robert Douglas Spencer practiced medicine in a small town in the anthracite coal region of Pennsylvania. Dr. Spencer treated colds, set fractures, an...
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Disco and Atomic War
Directed by Jaak Kilmi • Documentary • 2009 • 80 minutes
Winner of the Best Documentary prize at the Warsaw International Film Festival, this witty, charming, and provocative film recounts how in the mid 1980's, the nation of Estonia still lay firmly in the grip of the Soviet Union, and the repr...
