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Icarus Films

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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Icarus Films
  • Rabbit a la Berlin

    Directed by Bartek Konopka & Piotr Roslowski • Documentary • 2009 • 39 minutes

    RABBIT A LA BERLIN is the 2010 Academy Award-nominated story of thousands of wild rabbits which lived in the Death Zone of the Berlin Wall. This is the first film showing the story of the Wall and the reunification of...

  • Red Persimmons

    Directed by Shinsuke Ogawa, Peng Xiaolian • Documentary • 2001 • 90 minutes

    The ostensible subject of this remarkably beautiful film is the growing, drying, peeling and packaging of persimmons in the tiny Japanese village of Kaminoyama. The inhabitants explain that it is the perfect combination ...

  • Remembrance of Things to Come

    Directed by Chris Marker, Yannick Bellon • Documentary • 2001 • 42 minutes

    Chris Marker's "cine-essay" is dense and demanding, a splendid reminder of the agility, poetry, and power of his nimble, capacious mind.

    Ostensibly a portrait of photographer Denise Bellon, focusing on the two decades be...

  • Ricardo and Malthus: Did You Say Freedom?

    Directed by Ilan Ziv • Documentary • 2014 • 53 minutes

    'To see weeds grow where we used to build things that were in every General Motors vehicle is just terrible.' - Art Reyes, electrician and former GM employee, Flint, Michigan

    In Flint, Michigan, a weed-strewn lot is all that's left of a fa...

  • Rocky Road to Dublin

    Directed by Peter Lennon • Documentary • With Seán Ó Faoláin, Conor Cruise O’Brien, John Houston • 1967 • 67 minutes

    ROCKY ROAD TO DUBLIN is a provocative and revealing portrait of Ireland in the Sixties, a society characterized by a stultifying educational system, a morally repressive and polit...

  • Sacred Water

    Directed by Olivier Jourdain • Documentary • 2017 • 60 minutes

    "If a lot of water flows, the town will be flooded. The water company can close down. We have all the water we need." —Fanny, guest on Flash-FM in Rwanda Vestine Dusabe is a radio host and sex educator with a mission: promoting sexua...

  • Salvador Allende

    Directed by Patricio Guzmán • Documentary • 2004 • 100 minutes

    A leftist revolutionary or a reformist democrat? A committed Marxist or a constitutionalist politician? An ethical and moral man or, as Richard Nixon called him, a 'son of a bitch'? In SALVADOR ALLENDE, acclaimed Chilean filmmaker Pa...

  • Saving Mes Aynak

    Directed by Brent E. Huffman • Documentary • 2015 • 58 minutes

    SAVING MES AYNAK follows Afghan archaeologist Qadir Temori as he races against time to save a 5,000-year-old archaeological site in Afghanistan from imminent demolition. A Chinese state-owned mining company is closing in on the ancie...

  • School of Babel

    Directed by Julie Bertuccelli • Documentary • 2013 • 89 minutes

    Welcome to one Parisian school's program for newly arrived immigrant children from all over the world. At 'La Grange aux Belles' school in the diverse 10th district of Paris has a program for newly arrived immigrant children that pr...

  • Second Time Around

    Directed by Peter Davis and John Lindley • Documentary • 1982 • 60 minutes

    Part of the acclaimed Middletown series.

    Focusing on the wedding arrangements of David and Elaine, each of whom is a divorcee, SECOND TIME AROUND presents the complexities of contemporary marriage in the United States.

  • Seed Battles

    Directed by Kees Brouwer • Documentary • 2014 • 50 minutes

    Hidden deep inside a massive mountain in inhospitable Spitsbergen, Norway, is the most important vault in the world: the Global Seed Vault. It is 20 degrees below zero and the vault is able to withstand earthquakes, floods, missile attac...

  • Secret Museums

    Directed by Peter Woditsch • Documentary • 2008 • 77 minutes

    Throughout the ages, erotic art has been created by some of the world's best-known artists, but it is rarely on public display. Whether it is held in private collections, or kept under lock and key in museums and libraries worldwide, e...

  • Seeds of Hunger

    Directed by Yves Billy and Richard Prost • Documentary • 2008 • 52 minutes

    Today more than three billion people worldwide suffer from malnutrition, including one billion who are starving. Filmed in Africa, China, Latin America and the U.S., SEEDS OF HUNGER examines issues involved in creating su...

  • Seeing is Believing

    Directed by Katerina Cizek and Peter Wintonick • Documentary • 2002 • 58 minutes

    It may be the greatest media technology paradigm shift since TV's advent. From Rodney King to Osama Bin Laden, handicams aren't just for weddings and family vacations anymore. Over the past decade, amateur camcorder...

  • Seven Songs for Malcolm X

    Directed by John Akomfrah • Documentary • 1993 • 52 minutes

    An homage to the inspirational African-American civil rights leader, SEVEN SONGS FOR MALCOLM X collects testimonies, eyewitness accounts and dramatic reenactments to tell the life, legacy, loves, and losses of Malcolm X.

    Featuring inte...

  • Seventeen

    Directed by Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines • Documentary • 1982 • 120 minutes

    Part of the acclaimed Middletown series.

    In their final year at Muncie's Southside High School, a group of seniors hurtles toward maturity with a combination of joy, despair, and an aggravated sense of urgency. They are...

  • Sex, Lies and Tabloids!

    Directed by Jean-Baptiste Peretie • Documentary • 2015 • 52 minutes

    They're lurid, obnoxious, disdainful and explicit. And we love them - and love to hate them. SEX, LIES AND TABLOIDS! charts the rise and fall of tabloid papers in the UK and US, including the New York Post, The Sun, and notoriou...

  • Sleeping Souls

    Directed by Alexander Abaturov • Documentary • 2013 • 50 minutes

    Atchinsk is a Siberian town 2500 miles away from Moscow where Soviet dissidents and, before them, the Tsar's opponents were deported. It's pre-election season, and the small, sleepy town is abuzz with the voices of regime supporter...

  • Sociology is a Martial Art

    Directed by Pierre Carles • Documentary • With Pierre Bourdieu • 2001 • 146 minutes

    SOCIOLOGY IS A MARTIAL ART, a documentary about Pierre Bourdieu's life, became an unexpected hit in France just prior to his death. Filmed over three years, director Pierre Carles' camera follows Bourdieu as he l...

  • Sol LeWitt

    Directed by Chris Teerink • Documentary • 2012 • 72 minutes

    'Conceptual artists leap to conclusions logic cannot reach,' Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) said in a rare audio-interview from 1974. Notoriously camera-shy, Lewitt refused awards and rarely granted interviews, yet in Chris Teerink's sensitive ...

  • Sound and Chaos: The Story of BC Studio

    Directed by Ryan Douglass and Sara Leavitt • Documentary • 2015 • 75 minutes

    For over 30 years, Martin Bisi has recorded music from his studio in Brooklyn's Gowanus neighborhood. After a chance New York encounter, the studio was founded with money from Brian Eno, who subsequently worked on the a...

  • South

    Directed by Chantal Akerman • Documentary • 1999 • 70 minutes

    Inspired by her love of William Faulkner and James Baldwin, renowned director Chantal Akerman had planned to produce a meditation on the American South. However, just days before she was to begin filming, James Byrd, Jr. was murdered ...

  • Starfish Aorta Colossus (Lynne Sachs)

    Directed by Lynne Sachs • Documentary • 2015 • 5 minutes

    Poetry watches film. Film reads poetry. Paolo Javier’s text is a catalyst for the digital sculpting of an 8mm Kodachrome canvas. Syntactical ruptures and the celebration of nouns illuminate twenty-five years of rediscovered film journeys. ...

  • States of Unbelonging

    Directed by Lynne Sachs • Documentary • 2015 • 63 minutes

    The core of this haunting meditation on war, land, the Bible, and filmmaking is a portrait of Revital Ohayon, an Israeli filmmaker and mother killed near the West Bank. Director Lynne Sachs creates a film on the violence of the Middle Eas...