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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Ghosts of Attica
Directed by Brad Lichtenstein • Documentary • With Susan Sarandon • 2001 • 90 minutes
Attica. Like Watergate and Vietnam, it is an icon of recent history. Gov. Rockefeller's brutal re-taking of the prison - a nine-minute, 1600-bullet assault that took the lives of 29 inmates and 10 guards - put ...
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Gringo Trails
Directed by Pegi Vail • Documentary • 2013 • 79 minutes
Are tourists destroying the planet-or saving it? How do travelers change the remote places they visit, and how are they changed? From the Bolivian jungle to the party beaches of Thailand, and from the deserts of Timbuktu, Mali to the breath...
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Guanape Sur
Directed by Janos Richter • Documentary • 2010 • 27 minutes
Guanape Sur. A barren rock island off the coast of Peru. No soil, no water. Nothing is growing here.
Around its shores a restricted area has been established. The island serves hundreds of thousands of sea birds as a breeding ground.
...
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Guns and Mothers
Directed by Thom Powers • Documentary • 2003 • 53 minutes
Two advocacy groups, The Million Moms and the Second Amendment Sisters, are diametrically opposed on gun control, but they agree on one point: mothers will and should have a voice in determining gun control policy in America. GUNS and MOT...
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H2Omx
Directed by Jose Cohen • Documentary • 2013 • 82 minutes
Built on a basin surrounded by mountains and with little drainage, Mexico City is facing a water crisis driven by geography, population, and history. With a growing population, a depleted aquifer, and 40 percent of the water being brought ...
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Hamou-Beya, Sand Fishers
Directed by Andrey Samoute Diarra • Documentary • 2012 • 72 minutes
The Bozo of Mali are people of the water. For generations, they have lived along the banks of the Niger river, fishing for their livelihood. But climate change and drought have brought lower water levels and fewer fish, driving ...
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Hotel Terminus - Part I
Directed by Marcel Ophuls • Documentary • 1988 • 114 minutes
"Making this film was like an intense fight for the survival of memory itself."—Marcel Ophuls
A brilliant and epic Academy Award-winning examination of the Nazi SS officer Klaus Barbie, the infamous "Butcher of Lyon", HOTEL TERMINUS: ...
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Hotel Terminus - Part II
Directed by Marcel Ophuls • Documentary • 1988 • 107 minutes
"Making this film was like an intense fight for the survival of memory itself."—Marcel Ophuls
A brilliant and epic Academy Award-winning examination of the Nazi SS officer Klaus Barbie, the infamous "Butcher of Lyon", HOTEL TERMINUS: ...
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Hotel Terminus - Part III
Directed by Marcel Ophuls • Documentary • 1988 • 46 minutes
"Making this film was like an intense fight for the survival of memory itself."—Marcel Ophuls
A brilliant and epic Academy Award-winning examination of the Nazi SS officer Klaus Barbie, the infamous "Butcher of Lyon", HOTEL TERMINUS: T...
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How Putin Came to Power
Directed by Tania Rakhmanova • Documentary • 2005 • 52 minutes
In August 1999, Vladimir V. Putin, head of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), successor to the KGB, was appointed Prime Minister. On December 31st of that year, Boris Yeltsin announced that Putin would succeed him as President ...
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I Am Somebody
Directed by Madeline Anderson • Documentary • 1970 • 30 minutes
In 1969, black female hospital workers in Charleston, South Carolina went on strike for union recognition and a wage increase, only to find themselves in a confrontation with the state government and the National Guard. Featuring An...
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I Don't Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman
Directed by Marianne Lambert • Documentary • 2015 • 67 minutes
I DON'T BELONG ANYWHERE: THE CINEMA OF CHANTAL AKERMAN explores some of the Belgian filmmaker's 40 plus films, and from Brussels to Tel Aviv, from Paris to New York, it charts the sites of her peregrinations.
An experimental filmma...
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Ice
Directed by Robert Kramer • Drama • With Robert Kramer, Leo Braudy, Tom Griffin, Paul McIsaac • 1969 • 128 minutes
ICE is an innovative independent thriller, shot in New York City, which centers on a revolutionary group plotting to attack a fascistic political regime. Using a fictitious war with...
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Imaginary Feasts
Directed by Anne Georget • Documentary • 2014 • 70 minutes
IMAGINARY FEASTS explores how in Nazi concentration cmaps, Soviet Gulags and Japanese prison camps, starving prisoners shared and recorded favorite meals and recipes. By examing how these objects of survival, the film shows quiet acts of...
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In Search of Memory
Directed by Petra Seeger • Documentary • With Eric Kandel • 2008 • 95 minutes
'Memory is everything. Without it we are nothing,' says neuroscientist Eric Kandel, winner of the Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking research on the physiology of the brain's storage of memories. As he explains, memory...
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In the Intense Now
Directed by João Moreira Salles • Documentary • 2017 • 127 minutes
Made following the discovery of amateur footage shot in China in 1966 during the first and most radical stage of the Cultural Revolution, IN THE INTENSE NOW speaks to the fleeting nature of moments of great intensity. Scenes of C...
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In the Steps of Trisha Brown
Directed by Marie-Helene Rebois • Documentary • With Lisa Kraus, Carolyn Lucas & the dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet • 2016 • 79 minutes
A unique figure in the history of contemporary dance, Trisha Brown has inflected its course in crucial ways. Her choices involve letting a certain chaos come...
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Inside Out
Directed by Zohreh Shayesteh • Documentary • 2006 • 39 minutes
Maria is a middle-aged single woman with three children. Saman is a newly married young man. Arash is an eighteen-year-old high-school dropout. The one thing they have in common is that all three are transsexuals living in the Islami...
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Integration Report 1
Directed by Madeline Anderson • Documentary • 1960 • 20 minutes
INTEGRATION REPORT 1 examines the struggle for black equality in Alabama, Brooklyn and Washington, D.C., incorporating footage by documentary legends Albert Maysles and Ricky Leacock, protest songs by Maya Angelou, and a speech by M...
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Investigation of a Flame
Directed by Lynne Sachs • Documentary • With Daniel Berrigan, Philip Berrigan • 2001 • 45 minutes
"Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house... The time is past whe...
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Jaguar
Directed by Jean Rouch • Documentary • 1967 • 88 minutes
One of Jean Rouch's classic ethnofictions, JAGUAR follows three young Songhay men from Niger -- Lam Ibrahim, Illo Goudel'ize, and the legendary performer Damoure Zika--on a journey to the Gold Coast (modern day Ghana).
Drawing from his o...
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Jean Rouch, the Adventurous Filmmaker
Directed by Laurent Védrine • Documentary • With Jean Rouch • 2017 • 55 minutes
Jean Rouch first went to Niger in 1941 as a 24-year-old civil engineer, building roads in the French colony. But unlike other colonists, he came to see Nigeriens as equals, spending much of the next 60 years in West ...
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Journal de France
Directed by Raymond Depardon and Claudine Nougaret • Documentary • 2012 • 100 minutes
Travelling alone, internationally acclaimed photographer and filmmaker Raymond Depardon spent six years capturing his home country with a large format camera. This long, solitary road trip provided fertile grou...
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Julietta
Directed by Marc Allégret • Drama • With Jean Marais, Dany Robin, Jeanne Moreau • 1953 • 97 minutes
JULIETTA is a romantic comedy with the whimsical energy of a hummingbird. Dany Robin stars as the eponymous demoiselle, a flighty, impulsive pixie in white gloves who is engaged to an older prince...
