Some people fly too close to the sun. Their curiosity, their need to create, and above all their willingness to say the unspoken take them high above the comforts of normal opinion and into dangerous elevations. They make art and cultivate ideas that bring light and beauty to the world, they reassess ancient beliefs, and they enrich the human experience, but oftentimes this mission generates too much heat for their own health.

The Icarus Fringe and Film Festival is both a refuge for journalists, comics, and public intellectuals whose creations bring them trouble and a celebration of the work they do. Dangerous creators from all over the world come to Icarus Fest to share the ideas that in the public arena have gotten them burned. They come together to express our common dissatisfaction with the status quo in politics, popular culture, and the world of ideas and to offer visions of something more interesting, more pleasurable, more contentious, more amusing, and perhaps more just. This is a festival of dissent, in which the canceled come together in solidarity if not in agreement. But it is also a celebration of creation, of the flight into the new, the unknown, and the dangerous.

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Thursday June 8 (7PM-11PM)
Icarus Fest begins in the historic Rivoli Theater with a screening and examination of Blade Runner, a film that predicted the rise of omnipresent state and corporate power and asked whether humanity was flying too close to the sun.

Friday, June 9 (10AM-4PM) & (7PM-11PM)
Day Two of the festival focuses on the culture of our time. Following the screening of Safe, a film that portrays the alienation and anxiety of a world obsessed with imaginary external threats, panels and live podcast interviews on several stages throughout the day will take up the meaning of everyday life in a neoliberal society. 

Day Two culminates with Icarus Fest Comedy Night, featuring a lineup of stand-up comics comprised of Rich Vos, Kurt Metzger, Lou Perez, Dan Naturman, and Danny Polishchuk, followed by a headliner set by Kurt Metzger, whose fame as a joke-teller matches his infamy as a truth-teller.

Saturday, June 10 (10AM-4PM) & (6:30PM-10PM)
On Day Three we go to war. Featuring the leading critics of the global US empire and the security state, on this day the festival grants a platform to the most serious critiques of the interventions by the United States government into other countries and into our private lives.

In the evening of Day Three we convene in the Rivoli for a screening of “the most controversial film of the year,” The UnRedacted, followed by a no-holds-barred panel discussion with the filmmaker and our leading dissident journalists.

Sunday, June 11 (10AM-4PM)
We center the final day of the festival around the greatest work of art to ever be canceled. Once considered to be one of the very best films ever made, Gone With The Wind is no longer shown in theaters—except in the Rivoli Theater at Icarus Fest. Jack Mason of The Perfume Nationalist podcast will join Thaddeus Russell and the audience in an examination of the aesthetic and cultural quality of the film but also about what its message and taboo status tell us about the value of art in our world.