There is no film I’m more pleased and proud to see here at Sundance than “Trouble the Water,” directed by Rooftop’s neighbors and friends Carl Deal and Tia Lessin. Dan and I first saw a rough cut of this film about a year ago and the material was so powerful and the story so compelling [...]

I almost never agree with the Academy Awards (hey, if I did, what would be the point of Rooftop Films anyway?), but I’m certainly thrilled that three films that played at Rooftop in 2007 have been nominated for awards. The films are “Freeheld” (directed by Cynthia Wade), “Salim Baba” (directed by Tim Sternberg and Francisco [...]

Rooftop showed Chris Waitt’s humorous narrative short “Dupe” a couple years ago, so I was very eager to check out his debut feature. The slick short starred Chris as an extremely lazy hipster who orders off the internet a cloning machine (that looks like an crappy old photocopier) so he can send his dupes off [...]

Sunday, January 20, 6:30 PMMonday, January 21, 6:30PMSundance New Frontier on Main333 Main St. (Lower Level) Animation with live music by CalifoneFREE
Brent Green is the closest thing I’ve got to a religion. His animations, performed with live scores, with Brent shrieking out the stories, scare the hell out of me, and fill me with hope. [...]

Saw a great program at Slamdance today. “City of Cranes,” directed by Eva Weber, is exactly the type of film I would hope for in a documentary about construction crane operators: the images are dazzling without being showy, the interviews are lovely without being precious. It tells you things you never thought about cranes, [...]

Rooftop’s core artistic staff (Mark Elijah Rosenberg, Dan Nuxoll and Genevieve DeLaurier) will be out in Park City this week, supporting our alumnae filmmakers (see below), scouting for new work, hanging out with filmmakers, festival programmers, funders and friends, and doing what we love best–watching great films. If you’re going to be out there, drop [...]

Do you ever look at the people around you and think, “My friends are doing pretty amazing stuff”? That’s the way I think we all feel at Rooftop Films right now. Entering our 12th year, the community of filmmakers who have shown work at Rooftop now numbers over 1,400, and the films they are making [...]

Josh Safdie and Red Bucket Films, the makers of a bunch of charming films about quirky urban fairy tales and curious encounters (including The Back of Her Head, Rooftop 8/11/07), have a new vignette about two adorable kids unsatisfied with their frighteningly metallic Christmas tree. They go off in search of a real, old-fashioned tree, [...]

One of the most popular films we ever showed at Rooftop was the simple and darkly sweet animation Middle Dog Gets Angry, directed by George Gendi.
George now would like to send you his own bit of melancholy holiday greetings, to be celebrated with a good meal. Eat up!
(Click here to launch the 45 [...]