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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Minute Bodies: The Intimate World Of F. Percy Smith
Directed by Stuart A. Staples • Documentary • With tindersticks • 2016 • 55 minutes
This meditative, immersive film by tindersticks' Stuart A. Staples is a tribute to the astonishing work and achievements of naturalist, inventor and pioneering British filmmaker F. Percy Smith (1880-1945).
Based...
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Miss Kiet's Children
Directed by Petra Lataster-Czisch & Peter Lataster • Documentary • 2016 • 113 minutes
Kiet Engels is the kind of teacher one wishes every schoolchild could have. She is strict but never harsh. She is loving but never soft. Her patience in endless.
Many of Miss Kiet's pupils are refugees who hav...
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Moi, Un Noir (Jean Rouch)
Directed by Jean Rouch • Documentary • 1958 • 70 minutes
Winner of the prestigious Prix Louis Delluc in 1958, MOI, UN NOIR marked Jean Rouch's break with traditional ethnography, and his embrace of the collaborative and improvisatory strategies he called "shared ethnography" and "ethnofiction."
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Mr. CO2
Directed by Yves Billy • Documentary • 2010 • 52 minutes
MR. CO2 opens in Copenhagen, where the world's political leaders gather in December 2009 to try and hammer out a new carbon treaty to replace the Kyoto Accord.
The developing world, which faces the most devastation from climate change, p...
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Myanmar Diaries
Directed by Myanmar Film Collective • Documentary • 2023 • 70 minutes
MYANMAR DIARIES is comprised of short films by ten young anonymous Burmese filmmakers, combined with emotionally harrowing citizen journalism documenting the junta’s brutality, as well as courageous resistance to it.
The film...
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Naji Al-Ali
Directed by Kasim Abid • Documentary • 1999 • 52 minutes
Throughout history artists have faced the threat of violence when their work offended the state or the political elite. The late Palestinian cartoonist Naji Al-Ali produced thousands of cartoons satirizing the powers that be in the Middle ...
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National Diploma
Directed by Dieudo Hamadi • Documentary • 2014 • 92 minutes
NATIONAL DIPLOMA follows a group of Congolese high-school students about to take the state exam in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Dieudo Hamadi's documentary closely follows them as they prepare for the test, from the benches of the ...
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Neither Allah, Nor Master!
Directed by Nadia El Fani • Documentary • 2011 • 71 minutes
Winner of the International Secular Prize, Tunisian-Franco filmmaker Nadia El Fani, an avowed atheist, takes a personal approach to this cinematic exploration of secularism in the Muslim country of Tunisia before and after the depositio...
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No Gods, No Masters - Pt. I
Directed by Tancrède Ramonet • Documentary • 2017 • 52 minutes
This episode of NO GODS NO MASTERS shows how anarchism emerged from the horrendous social conditions facing workers at a time when industrialization was, paradoxically, providing better hygiene and social standards – for some. In an ...
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No Gods, No Masters - Pt. II
Directed by Tancrède Ramonet • Documentary • 2017 • 52 minutes
By the early 20th century, anarchists in France were a powerful enough constituency to draw the French president to an event. In England, they were considered so dangerous that when they occupied a London building, it took the full f...
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No Gods, No Masters - Pt. III
Directed by Tancrède Ramonet • Documentary • 2017 • 52 minutes
This episode of NO GODS NO MASTERS opens with the United States during the Depression, and the galvanizing role of the conviction and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. It was a period during which anarchists were characterized as bomb...
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No Home Movie
Directed by Chantal Akerman • Documentary • 2015 • 115 minutes
The final film from groundbreaking auteur Chantal Akerman, NO HOME MOVIE is a portrait of her relationship with her mother, Natalia, a Holocaust survivor and familiar presence in many of her daughter's films.
"At the center of Chan...
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Northern Light
Directed by Nick Bentgen and Lisa Kjerulff • Documentary • 2013 • 105 minutes
Set against the backdrop of a town's annual snowmobile race, NORTHERN LIGHT explores the working class experience in a series of captivating personal stories of recession-era America. The lives of three families change...
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Nostalgia for the Light
Directed by Patricio Guzmán • Documentary • 2010 • 90 minutes
Master director Patricio Guzmán travels 10,000 feet above sea level to the driest place on earth, the Atacama Desert, where atop the mountains astronomers from all over the world gather to observe the stars. The sky is so translucent ...
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Now He's Out in Public and Everyone Can See
Directed by Natalie Bookchin • Documentary • 2017 • 24 minutes
A riveting polyphonic documentary, NOW HE'S OUT IN PUBLIC AND EVERYONE CAN SEE presents a fractured narrative about an unnamed man whose racial identity is continually redrawn and contested by clusters of impassioned narrators. This ...
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Number One Fan (Elle l'Adore)
Directed by Jeanne Herry • Drama • With Sandrine Kiberlain, Laurent Lafitte • 2014 • 105 minutes
Muriel is a big talker. In fact, she makes stuff up all the time and always tells tall tales.
In first-time director Judith Herry’s tragi-comedy NUMBER ONE FAN, Sandrine Kiberlain (Life of Riley, Ma...
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O Amor Natural
Directed by Heddy Honigmann • Documentary • 2007 • 76 minutes
O AMOR NATURAL is a documentary film about the erotic poetry of one of the greatest Latin American poets of the 20th century, the Brazilian Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-1987).
The erotic poems of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, a hou...
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Ô saisons ô châteaux (Agnès Varda)
Directed by Agnès Varda • Documentary • With Danièle Delorme • 1956 • 21 minutes
This early Agnès Varda short looks at the castles of the Loire Valley — and the unusual histories and personalities behind them. Punctuated by first-person accounts, excerpts from well-known poems, and stylish re-cr...
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Oblivion
Directed by Heddy Honigmann • Documentary • 2008 • 93 minutes
The latest documentary from Heddy Honigmann (Forever, Metal and Melancholy, O Amor Natural) focuses on Peru's capital city of Lima.
OBLIVION provides intimate and moving portraits of street musicians, singers, vendors, shoeshine boys...
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Olivia
Directed by Jacqueline Audry • Drama • With Edwige Feuillere, Simone Simon • 1950 • 96 minutes
OLIVIA is a remarkable work by one of France’s first ground-breaking female filmmakers, which easily merits rediscovery today after being neglected for almost 70 years.
Plunging the viewer—and the ma...
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One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich
Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • With Andrei Tarkovsky • 2000 • 55 minutes
ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF ANDREI ARSENEVICH is renowned French filmmaker Chris Marker's homage to his friend and colleague, Andrei Tarkovsky, who died in 1986.
Widely regarded as one of the greatest filmmakers of th...
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One Day Pina Asked (Chantal Akerman)
An encounter between two of the most remarkable women artists of the 20th century, ONE DAY PINA ASKED... is Chantal Akerman's look at the work of choreographer Pina Bausch and her Wuppertal, Germany-based dance company. "This film is more than a documentary on Pina Bausch," a narrator announces a...
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Our Daily Bread
Directed by Nikolaus Geyrhalter • Documentary • 2005 • 92 minutes
OUR DAILY BREAD reveals the little-known world of high-tech agriculture. In a series of visually stunning, continuously tracking, wide-screen images that seem right out of a science-fiction movie, we see the places where food is c...
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Outlaw-Matsu Comes Home
Directed by Shohei Imamura • Documentary • 2012 • 48 minutes
Shohei Imamura rejoins Fujita, one of the subjects of IN SEARCH OF THE UNRETURNED SOLDIERS IN THAILAND, for the former soldier's first trip home to Japan following his post-war exile.
Fujita's reunion with Japan is not a happy one. He...
