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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Suzanna Andler
Directed by Benoît Jacquot • Drama • With Charlotte Gainsbourg, Niels Schneider • 2021 • 88 minutes
Accompanied by her lover, Suzanna (Charlotte Gainsbourg), 40, views a Riviera beach house for her family's summer vacation. This day, this break in her routine, in this new house, will mark a turn...
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System Error
Directed by Florian Opitz • Documentary • 2017 • 96 minutes
SYSTEM ERROR takes us from to the roots of the expectation of unlimited growth, particularly in the post-World War II years, to the financial crash of 2008 and beyond. Does the subsequent decade of simultaneous inequality, austerity, an...
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Thank You for the Rain
Directed by Julia Dahr and Kisilu Musya • Documentary • 2017 • 87 minutes
Five years ago Kisilu, a Kenyan farmer, started to use his camera to capture the life of his family, his village and the damages of climate change. When a violent storm throws him and a Norwegian filmmaker together we see ...
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The Absent House
Directed by Ruben Abruna • Documentary • 2013 • 55 minutes
A designer from Puerto Rico pioneered green architecture thirty years ago, and today he confronts climate change with sustainable constructions including a house without a roof that is completely independent of the power and water utilit...
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The Apology
Directed by Tiffany Hsiung • Documentary • 2016 • 104 minutes
THE APOLOGY follows the personal journeys of three former 'comfort women' who were among the 200,000 girls and young women kidnapped and forced into military sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II.
Some 70 ...
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The Battle of Chile (Part 1)
Directed by Patricio Guzman • Documentary • 1975 • 96 minutes
On September 11, 1973, President Salvador Allende's democratically elected Chilean government was overthrown in a bloody coup by General Augusto Pinochet's army.
Patricio Guzmán and five colleagues had been filming the political dev...
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The Battle of Chile (Part 2)
Directed by Patricio Guzman • Documentary • 1976 • 88 minutes
On September 11, 1973, President Salvador Allende's democratically elected Chilean government was overthrown in a bloody coup by General Augusto Pinochet's army.
Patricio Guzmán and five colleagues had been filming the political dev...
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The Battle of Chile (Part 3)
Directed by Patricio Guzman • Documentary • 1978 • 78 minutes
THE POWER OF THE PEOPLE deals with the creation by ordinary workers and peasants of thousands of local groups of 'popular power' to distribute food, occupy, guard and run factories and farms, oppose black market profiteering, and link...
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The Big Game
Directed by E. J. Vaughn • Documentary • 1982 • 60 minutes
Part of the acclaimed Middletown series.
As Muncie Central and Anderson High prepare to meet for the annual basketball game, a game charged with the spirit of long-established rivalry, THE BIG GAME examines what this competition, and th...
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The Campaign
Directed by Tom Cohen • Documentary • 1982 • 90 minutes
Part of the acclaimed Middletown series.
Focusing on a mayoral race in Muncie, Indiana, THE CAMPAIGN follows closely the personalities, strategies, and pressures of an American political contest. In particular, it examines the sharply cont...
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The Case of the Grinning Cat
Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 2004 • 58 minutes
In his newest film, French documentarian and cinema-essayist Chris Marker reflects on French and international politics, art and culture at the start of the new millennium. In November 2001, the filmmaker became intrigued, as did many ot...
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The Chinese Lives of Uli Sigg
Directed by Michael Schindhelm • Documentary • With Uli Sigg, Ai Weiwei, Cao Chong’en, Cao Fei, Pierre de Meuron, Hans-Peter Fallegger • 2016 • 93 minutes
A documentary about the entrepreneur, diplomat and art collector Uli Sigg, and the tense sociopolitical context of China's ongoing transforma...
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The Destruction of Memory
Directed by Tim Slade • Documentary • 2016 • 85 minutes
The bombing of Sarajevo's National Library and the burning of its ancient books. The looting of the Iraqi National Museum and destruction of its priceless historical objects. The beheading of Kahled al-Asaad, long-time lead archaeologist fo...
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The Embassy (Chris Marker)
Directed by Chris Marker • Drama • 1973 • 21 minutes
One of Chris Marker's few fiction films, THE EMBASSY shows political dissidents seeking refuge in a foreign embassy after a military coup d'état in an unidentified country. Over the next few days, more and more people fleeing the military assa...
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The Forgotten Space (Allan Sekula & Noel Burch)
Directed by Allan Sekula & Noel Burch • Documentary • 2010 • 112 minutes
The 'forgotten space' of Allan Sekula and Noel Burch's essay film is the sea, the oceans through which 90% of the world's cargo now passes. At the heart of this space is the container box, which, since its invention in the ...
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The Giant Is Falling
Directed by Rehad Desai and Jabulani Mzozo • Documentary • 2016 • 77 minutes
The loyalty people have for the party of liberation operates at a deep psychological level. But in recent years, the ANC's popularity is at an all time low, not least amongst people who were once its most loyal supporte...
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The Good Breast
Directed by Bernadette Wegenstein • Documentary • 2016 • 94 minutes
THE GOOD BREAST explores breast cancer as ritual, presenting today's rise of the mastectomy in the U.S. as a modern form of breast sacrifice.
The no-nonsense veteran breast cancer surgeon Dr. Lauren Schnaper believes that fear...
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The Hermitage Dwellers
Directed by Aliona van der Horst • Documentary • 2003 • 73 minutes
THE HERMITAGE DWELLERS is as much about the people who work in Russia's renowned museum as it is about the glorious art works housed in this St. Petersburg institution. We meet with several 'Hermitage-niks'-including Olga Bogdano...
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The Human Pyramid
Directed by Jean Rouch • Documentary • 1961 • 93 minutes
At the Lycée Français of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Rouch worked with students there who willingly enacted a story about the arrival of a new white girl, Nadine, and her effect on the interactions of and interracial relationships between the wh...
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The Intolerable Burden
Directed by Chea Prince • Documentary • 2003 • 56 minutes
In the autumn of 1965, sharecroppers Mae Bertha and Matthew Carter enrolled the youngest eight of their thirteen children in the public schools of Drew, Mississippi. Their decision to send the children to the formerly all white schools wa...
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The Invisible Frame
Directed by Cynthia Beatt • Documentary • With Tilda Swinton • 2010 • 60 minutes
In 1988 director Cynthia Beatt and the Tilda Swinton embarked on a filmic journey along the Berlin Wall to create the short film CYCLING THE FRAME (28', color, 1988). Riding her bicycle from the Brandenburg Gate to ...
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The Last Bolshevik
Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 1998 • 116 minutes
Based on the life and work of the Russian film director Alexander Medvedkin (1900-1989), THE LAST BOLSHEVIK is a tribute from one filmmaker to another. An archeological expedition into film history that reveals new cinematic treasures, ...
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The Lion Hunters
Directed by Jean Rouch • Documentary • 1965 • 77 minutes
Shot on the border between Niger and Mali over a period of seven years, THE LION HUNTERS is Jean Rouch's documentation of the lion hunt performed by the gow hunters of the Songhay people.
Rouch has said that he made the film 'to try to gi...
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The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear
Directed by Tinatin Gurchiani • Documentary • 2013 • 101 minutes
A filmmaker puts out a casting call for young adults, aged 15- to 23. The director wants to make a film about growing up in her home country, Georgia, and find commonalities across social and ethnic lines. She travels through citie...
