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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Paths of the Soul
Directed by Zhang Yang • Drama • With Tsring Chodron, Tsewang Dolkar, Jiangcuo Seba • 2016 • 117 minutes
An astonishing journey of redemption, faith, and devotion. Internationally acclaimed filmmaker Zhang Yang ( Shower, Getting Home ) blurs the border between documentary and fiction to follow a...
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Presumed Guilty
Directed by Roberto Hernández • Documentary • 2009 • 88 minutes
In December 2005 Tono Zuniga was picked up off the street in Mexico City, Mexico, and sentenced to 20 years for murder based on the testimony of a single, shaky eyewitness. PRESUMED GUILTY tells the heart-wrenching story of a man wh...
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Profit and Nothing But!
Directed by Raoul Peck • Documentary • 2001 • 52 minutes
Who said that the economy serves mankind? What is this world where one third of the population, in the rich countries, or more precisely the wealthiest two percent in these countries, control everything? A world where the economy is law, w...
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Profits of Punishment
Directed by Catherine Scott • Documentary • 2001 • 52 minutes
Tough new sentencing laws across the U.S. are resulting in an influx of prisoners, creating massive overcrowding. Many States are responding to this crisis by contracting out the management and liability of prisoners to private multi-...
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Propaganda: The Manufacture of Consent
Directed by Jimmy Leipold • Documentary • With Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, Stuart Ewen, David Miller • 2020 • 53 minutes
In 1916, Woodrow Wilson ran on a platform strongly opposing US entry into WWI. But just a few months after taking office, the United States declared war on Germany. Soon after...
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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...
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Red Hook Justice
Directed by Meema Spadola • Documentary • 2004 • 55 minutes
Each year, our nation's courts process over 11 million low-level crimes, many of which involve repeat offenders. In 2000, an experimental court opened its doors in Red Hook, Brooklyn-a neighborhood plagued by a cycle of unemployment, po...
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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 ...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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.
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
