“Eight-year-old Mathias is fascinated by planes, flight and the Greek myth of Daedalus and Icarus. But when his father promises the boy a dream come true--a plane ride over the city on his next birthday--he does so less out of love than as a way of diverting the child's attention from his affair with another woman. When the day comes and the father is nowhere to be found, young Mathias reinterprets the myth of Daedalus and Icarus as one of murder rather than warning: Daedalus told Icarus to fly too close to the sun.... Anguished at the apparent abandonment by his father, Mathias has painfully taken his first steps into the adult world. Ikarus is a true gem for any national cinema, reaching far beyond its genre classification as a children's film to the rich and universal level of parent-child relationships. Subtly, the metaphor of ‘flight' applies not only to the desire to overcome Oedipal determination, but also here to a thinly-veiled wish to escape beyond a closed society.” Tony Safford, AFI