By Kurt Orzeck

“The Loving Story,” first-time director Nancy Buirski’s documentary about interracial marriage, has been acquired by Icarus Films, TheWrap has learned.

The movie — which is on the Oscar short list for Documentary Feature — will air Feb. 14 on HBO. Three months later, New York-based documentary-film distributor Icarus Films will distribute “The Loving Story” to a yet-undetermined number of theaters.

“We’re very fortunate that a distributor wanted to take it,” Buirski told TheWrap at a Tuesday screening of “The Loving Story” at Los Angeles’ Museum of Tolerance. “They think it will play well on a big screen and go beyond the HBO audience.”

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“every day a different camera from a different film”

including:

Si j’avais quatre dromedaires (Chris Marker 1966): Rolleiflex

Jonathan Miller, President of the film distribution company Icarus Films — www.IcarusFilms.com—announced today that Icarus Films has acquired Program Development Associates —www.DisabilityTraining.com — a leading distributor of DVDs, multimedia training and educational resources on disability related topics.

Following Icarus Films’ acquisition two years ago of the FANLIGHT PRODUCTIONS COLLECTION — www.Fanlight.com — of 400 health care-related films and DVDs, the addition of the Program Development Associates collection of over 600 DVD titles and other resources, will enable the customers of both companies to access the best and most suitable films and DVDs to meet their different (and often specific) needs, while also helping the titles distributed by both companies to reach wider audiences.

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Seven Chris Marker films, Tilda Swinton, Edward Said and more! – 15 releases from Icarus Films now streaming online via MUBI

Patricio Guzmán: Direct Address #10 from Reverse Shot on Vimeo.

From the Huffington Post’s ArtInfo

NEW YORK–In a landmark decision handed down in spirited fashion last Friday, Manhattan federal court judge Deborah Batts ruled against Richard Prince and the Gagosian Gallery in a copyright lawsuit brought by French photographer Patrick Cariou, who claimed that the prominent appropriation artist had unlawfully used his photographs in a series of paintings and other works. The ruling both affects millions of dollars worth of Prince artworks and promises to send tremors though the art community at large, where appropriation has become a widespread artistic strategy despite its often tenuous legality under the United States’ statute of “fair use.”

Filed in 2008, Cariou’s lawsuit stems from photographs that he took of Rastafarians in Jamaica over six year and then published in the 2000 book, “Yes, Rasta.” According to the suit, Prince then lifted 41 images from the book for a series of artworks called “Canal Zone,” which were featured in a Gagosian show that opened in December 2007. Several of the artworks, which were composed of Cariou’s images overlaid with brushy strokes in the style of Willem de Kooning and collaged with pornographic images, sold for more than $10 million, with other collectors acquiring several more million dollars worth of art for Prince and the gallery through trades. Cariou received no compensation for these works, and both Prince and gallery representatives testified in court that they had not requested permission to reuse the photographs.

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Posted by Richard Brody at The Front Row

On Thursday, St. Patrick’s Day, I offered a tweet to remind readers (as I have in years past) of Peter Lennon’s great 1968 documentary “Rocky Road to Dublin,” about the narrow religious and political dogmas that Ireland imposed on its citizens and on some of the charming manifestations of those settled ways. It’s fierce yet tender, rationally and practically progressive, yet nostalgic in advance for the sweetness that would be lost along with the old habits. On Saturday, I heard, via Twitter, from Paul Duane (who directed, among many other films, “The Making of ‘Rocky Road to Dublin’ ”), that Lennon had just died. He was eighty-one years old.

“Rocky Road to Dublin” is the only film that Lennon made. He was the Paris correspondent for the Guardian when he was inspired to go home and make the film—with the participation of the great French cameraman Raoul Coutard.

Read the full post at NewYorker.com

The Atacama Desert of northern Chile is the driest place in the world and surely one of the most desolate. But it has always proved fertile ground for the Chilean documentary filmmaker Patricio Guzmán, who first filmed there 40 years ago and has now returned to make “Nostalgia for the Light,” a meditation on astronomy, archeology, geology and human rights.

“The Atacama is where many elements of our past are concentrated and conserved,” Mr. Guzmán, 69, said in an interview last month in Manhattan. “Not just the past of Chile, but of the Earth and even the galaxy. I’d been wanting for the longest time to make a film that brought all of this together, but the hardest part was that those four worlds are parallel lines.”

What finally enabled Mr. Guzmán to make “Nostalgia for the Light,” which opens on Friday at the IFC Center in Greenwich Village, was his realization that the subjects he wanted to address did have a point in common: the preservation of memory. The women who comb the desert looking for the remains of loved ones who disappeared under the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet share that trait with the archaeologists and geologists who work in the shadow of the astronomical observatories that dot the Atacama, drawn by its clear skies.

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Check out the website for Patricio Guzmàn’s latest film here