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 heroic 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.