Icarus acquires North American rights to Ulrike Ottinger’s Paris Calligrammes
Leading distributor of documentary films in North America, Icarus Films, has acquired the rights to Ulrike Ottinger’s latest feature documentary Paris Calligrammes in US and Canada. Beginning on Friday, April 30, 2021, Paris Calligrammes will expand to a wide virtual theatrical release supporting local cinematheques, museums, and arts organizations.

Ulrike Ottinger’s acclaimed documentary is a masterful look back at her own life, art, and formative years in 1960s bohemian Paris – featuring archival audio and visuals, along with Ottinger’s artwork and excerpts from her films. Paris Calligrammes transports back to the old Saint-Germain-des-Prés and Latin Quarter, with their literary cafés and jazz clubs, and revisits encounters with Jewish exiles, life with her artistic community, the worldviews of Parisian ethnologists and philosophers, the political upheavals of the Algerian War and May 1968, and the legacy of the colonial era.
“One of the great works of first-person cinema. Ottinger’s personal and political masterwork. Extraordinary; a work of vital and energetic modernism.”
—Richard Brody, The New Yorker
On Friday, April 23, 2021, Paris Calligrammes will virtually premiere at New York’s Film Forum. Following that, on Friday, April 30, 2021, Paris Calligrammes will expand to a wide virtual theatrical release.