Icarus Films

Althea Gibson’s life and achievements transcend sports. A truant from the rough streets of Harlem, Althea emerged as a most unlikely queen of the highly segregated tennis world in the 1950s. Her roots as a sharecropper’s daughter, her family’s migration north to Harlem in the 1930s, mentoring from Sugar Ray Robinson, David Dinkins and others, and fame that thrust her unwillingly into the glare of the early Civil Rights movement, all bring her story into a much broader realm of the American story.

A film about modern Japanese architecture, its roots in the Japanese tradition and its impact on the Nordic building-tradition. Winding its way through visions of the future, traditions, nature, concrete, gardens and high-tech, KOCHUU tells us how contemporary Japanese architects strive to unite the ways of modern man with the old philosophies in astounding constructions. Interviews with, and works by, Japanese architects Tadad Ando, Kisho Kurokawa, Toyo Ito and Kazuo Shinohara and Scandinavian architects Sverre Fehn, Kristian Gullichsen and Juhani Pallasmaa.

January 22, 1932. An unprecedented peasant uprising erupts in western El Salvador, as a group of Latino and indigenous peasants cut army supply lines, attack a military garrison, and take control over several towns. Retribution is swift. After three days, the army and militias move in and, in some villages, slaughter all males over age 12. Elsewhere, they summarily execute anyone suspected of having a link to the Communists. Over the next few weeks, 10,000 people are massacred.

Documentary about WWII propaganda cartoons.

The notion of a Cuban civil society is often misrepresented in the U.S. mainstream media. According to most sources, Cuban civil society is limited to the opposition, which has little impact on the Cuban political scenario. Regardless, yearly, the U.S. government allocates tens of millions of taxpayer money to empower dissidents in the island. By doing so, it overlooks genuine expressions of pluralism, reform and contestation which are shaping the Cuban public sphere, sometimes in autonomous ways, sometimes within State-run institutions. Through in-depth interviews to members of Cuban Civil society, this documentary explores the complexities associated to these processes, following the itinerary of the debate about the concept of civil society generated in Cuba, since the 90s to the present.

Before his journey into exile Jacobo Arbenz, the overthrown President of Guatemala, is presented to photographers stripped down to his underwear: an image seen around the world. Arbenz had led the successful 1944 revolt against the military dictatorship, a regime that had oppressed Guatemala since colonialism. Arbenz, the son of Swiss immigrants, was celebrated as a national hero. Elected President in 1950, Arbenz was not a member of any party - he didn't issue any manifestos. But he began to fulfill his promises - farmers got their own land. 'The first act of justice since colonial times,' said Arbenz. In the early 1950s, with the Cold War intensifying, then Vice President Richard Nixon said, 'Arbenz is not a Guatemalan President.' Nixon called him 'a foreigner, manipulated by foreign powers.' The young President of Guatemala was soon overthrown, declared a traitor, and chased out of the country.

The night of a lonely photographer with a Polaroid camera, looking for human connections in the alienating Amsterdam nightlife, ends with an indefinable souvenir.

Haile Gerima and Ryszard Kapuscinski travel around Ethiopia talking to people about their current situations and what needs to be done for a prosperous country.

Two interviews, recorded 16 years apart, illuminating the historic role, personality and thoughts of the novelist, philosopher and political activist who paved the way for Second-Wave Feminism.

Svetlana Parshina was deeply moved by her childhood reading of Twenty Letters to a Friend by Svetlana Alliluyeva, Joseph Stalin's daughter. Years later, learning that the now 82-year-old was living incognito in a Madison, Wisconsin retirement home, Parshina phones and requests an interview. After repeated denials, and only after insisting upon certain conditions, the now-82-year-old Alliluyeva finally consents to a rare filmed interview in which she discusses her education, marriages, her children, the development of her own humanistic philosophy, her CIA-assisted defection to the U.S., and her skeptical views on the competing Cold War ideologies. In more intimate moments, she discusses her childhood, her nanny, the suicide of her mother, her brothers Vasily and Yakov (who died in a Nazi concentration camp) and, of course, her famous father, who most Soviets saw as "a living God."

Until the 1950s, the Waorani were able to successfully defended their area of settlement – today’s Yasuni National Park in the Ecuadorian Amazon – with the aid of spears. Then Christian missionaries entered the thick rain forest and paved the way for an oil company. Nowadays many of the tribes are estranged as some want to benefit from the short-term money the company is offering while others fight to preserve their land, culture and independence under all circumstances.

RARE follows an extraordinary mother in a race against time to find a treatment for her daughter's rare genetic disease. When Donna Appell learned that her infant daughter Ashley had an extremely rare genetic disease that would kill her in thirty years, she set out to track down every person in the world with Hermansky-Pudlak Syndrome (HPS). Realizing that no one was going to help cure "just one child," Donna forms an advocacy group and travels throughout the US and Puerto Rico to gather as many patients as possible who suffer from HPS, which includes albinism, blindness, a bleeding disorder and often a fatal pulmonary fibrosis. By the time Ashley turns twenty, Donna, under insurmountable odds, has achieved something incredible: the advocacy group she started is now in the hundreds and the NIH has agreed to start a clinical trial.

Recounts the founding of Haiti through the eyes of two captured African tribespeople, Sili and Simba. Starting with their capture in Africa, the story follows their trans-Atlantic journey on a slave ship to Haiti. There they escape their slavery on a French plantation and join the fight for independence led by Toussaint L'Ouverture and Dessaline, ultimately joining in the celebration of the first raising of the Haitian flag.

"SHIGERU BAN features extensive interviews with this innovative young architect (b. 1957), who explains the practical, philosophical and esthetic aspects of his work. In addition to his conservationist interest in using recycled materials, Ban discusses his influences, his concerns with the bidimensional and tridimensional nature of his buildings, his aim to incorporate structural elements into the overall designs, as well as their sensitivity to light and shade, which lends unusual vitality to his buildings."

A documentary of a young couple and their two children living in a squatter settlement in the Philippine capital, Manila. Rather than just a report on poverty, this is a universal story of people experiencing everyday events with a mixture of humor, irritation, weariness, and courage. Cora and Celso make a living selling cigarettes at night outside a downtown hotel in defiance of City regulations. The film follows their lives over a three-month period, beginning with Cora's attempt to find a new room for the family after they have been evicted from their previous home. Later, Celso and Cora face a crisis in their own relationship aggravated by the stresses of their daily life.