Founded in Zurich in 2002, ican films gmbh is a production and distribution company with a focus on international documentary films. Director and producer Mirjam von Arx is company director. “With our films we want to throw an unusual perspective onto the world and take on themes that perplex, move, and also provoke the viewers.” The most recent cinema documentary “Seven Dumpsters and a Corpse” aroused controversy and triggered a significant media echo as a result of director Thomas Haemmerli’s focusing attention on such taboo subjects like death in the family and the “messie” phenomenon.

For Mirjam von Arx the path to the film business began in 1992: at the time she was accompanying Swiss singer Polo Hofer and his Schmetter Band on a musical road trip from Memphis to New Orleans. The film “Bluesiana” found its elongation five years later in “abXang,” a filmic homage to Polo and his band – the first of four feature-length cinema productions by ican films.

In 2005 a television documentary in coproduction with Condor Films about Roger Federer (“Replay”) as well as the cinema documentary “Building the Gherkin” were produced. ican films own the international rights to the latter. Awarded the FIFA Award (International Arts Film Festival Montreal), the architecture film documents the four and a half years of planning and construction of Norman Foster’s controversial landmark building in London and was the first long-term study that von Arx realized.

As a result of the significant international success of “Building the Gherkin” in cinemas, television, and at festivals, ican films launched its own department for long-term film projects in 2007. ican films is currently negotiating with various renowned architects and clients to document in film their extraordinary building projects.

Whether national heroes of rock, sport legends, or architectonic landmarks, with its productions ican films dares to look behind the facades of icons and yet never forgets that the big stories can also lie in our mother’s living room.