Icarus(2017)
dir. Bryan Fogel
A doping experiment turns into a defection story.
Where to watch: Streaming on NetflixLetterboxd ↗
A filmmaker testing performance-enhancing drugs on himself connects with a Russian anti-doping scientist, whose confession blows open a state-sponsored Olympic doping scheme.
Why it’s here
Started as one man's amateur doping experiment and ended up exposing state-run Olympic fraud, because the scientist he recruited to help became the whistleblower instead. Neither of them planned for that, and the film is honest about how much of it was luck.
Where This Film Lives
- Setting
- Russia
Read Alongside
Books that share a topic, theme, or setting with this film.
Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World
Anne Applebaum
The network behind every strongman.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia
Masha Gessen
Seven lives. Three decades. One slow disappearance.
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Doctor Zhivago
Boris Pasternak
Love and revolution eat each other alive.
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Heart of a Dog
Mikhail Bulgakov
The revolution turned a dog into a bureaucrat.
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One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
One day in a Siberian labor camp. Every detail counts.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Secondhand Time
Svetlana Alexievich
One day in a Siberian labor camp. Every detail counts.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov
he devil visits Soviet Moscow. Nobody notices.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
The Noise of Time
Julian Barnes
Shostakovich waits by the elevator for the secret police.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST