The 10 Most Anticipated Movies at Rooftop Films' 2013 Summer Series

Calling all cinephiles, casual moviegoers, and basically anyone looking to have some fun in New York City this summer: On May 10, Rooftop Films is kicking off their Summer Series, a May-through-August, borough-spanning outdoor film festival that brings the best in independent movies to local communities. No need for press passes, no need to RSVP, all you need is to check out the Rooftop Films site to easily purchase tickets for the flick that interests you.

If you can't make it to this Friday's opening night, titled This is What We Mean by Short Films, a presentation of shorts from around the world, at the Open Road Rooftop in the Lower East Side, don't worry. There are a lot more to catch, as the lineup year is more impressive than ever, including Sundance and SXSW favorites, respectively, Ain't Them Bodies Saints and Drinking Buddies.

And even if those mean nothing to you, each screening is its own main event. Not only do the filmmakers typically take part and engage with the audience, but the programmers also schedule a little something special to accompany the movie. To give you a taste on what we mean, this year, a slew of brass bands are scheduled to perform at the showing of Brasslands.

Before the festivities begin, we got a chance to speak to the festival's head honchos, founder and artistic director Mark Rosenberg and program director Dan Nuxoll, to get their take on the films we're most excited to see this year. Check out what they have to say about our 10 most anticipated movies at this Rooftop Films' 2013 Summer Series.

As told to Tara Aquino (@t_akino)

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Director: Sebastián Silva
Stars: Michael Cera, Gaby Hoffmann, Agustín Silva
Screening Date: June 28th

Rosenberg: Crystal Fairy is a very hilarious film that really, in the end, is also deeply emotionally affecting in ways that are not easy to pinpoint. On the surface, it's a Michael Cera comedy about this awkward guy looking for drugs in America, sort of the American buffoon who goes to a foreign country and steps on a lot of people's toes. But really, when the film starts to add up and the characters become much more rich and in-depth, you realize that it's saying some very interesting things about the characters. It's not just a sort of goofy comedy, it really gets to the heart of the twentysomething quest to have adventures, and explores what that says about ourselves. That's going to be a really interesting film for the world to see because I find it a very rich and fascinating work that is very poignant as well.

Director: Shaka King
Stars: Amari Cheatom, Trae Harris, Tone Tank, Isiah Whitlock Jr.
Screening Date: July 18th

Rosenberg: Newlyweeds is a Rooftop film fund recipient which is exciting for us. It's a really dark comedy that starts off as a sort of lighthearted take on getting by in the world, when you're maybe, you know, smoking too much weed. Then it becomes a little more serious, but always in slightly, not surreal, but unusual and unexpected ways.

It's also a love story and a Brooklyn-based film, so I think it's something the audience will really appreciate and enjoy, especially being in the neighborhood.

Director: Alison Brockhouse, Bryan Chang, Sara Huneke.
Stars: Various
Screening Date: July 13th

Nuxoll: Brasslands is a really fun project by Meerkat Media that is collected here in Brooklyn that's been doing some really great stuff for a really long time. This is a project that we had shown a clip from a couple of years ago while it was still in production as part of a screening we did in association with KickStarter, so it's something we've been excited to do for awhile, and we are really excited to be doing the New York premiere of it.

We had spoken awhile back with the guys behind Brasslands about how we wanted to recreate the feeling of the brass band festival that the documentary is about for the New York City audience as part of the screening. So, we teamed up with an organization called Arts Brookfield that has an amazing space outside the Winter Garden Atrium down in the Financial District right along the water. It's a really beautiful spot for showing films. We are looking forward to putting together an ambitious event that's going to be one of the bigger, more complicated events that we ever put together. There will be four different Serbian style brass bands that will be playing at the event in different regions of this plaza before the screening, all leading up to a big performance right before the movie.

The festival is kind of wild, with music everywhere and lots of different colorful characters all over the place, and I think both the film and the actual screening will convey that in a really fun way.

Director: Jordan Vogt-Roberts
Stars: Nick Robinson, Gabriel Basso, Moises Arias, Nick Offerman, Megan Mullally, Alison Bie, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Erin Moriarty
Screening Date: May 25th

Rosenberg: We thought Kings of Summer would, obviously, be a great summer film. It's coming-of-age story, but i think one that adults will understand as well. Jordan's characters are fantastic. The film is filled with a lot of a kid's joy and wonder at the world, but also with a significant relationship between the kids and the parents, which I think is pretty meaningful for the audience.

We've shown a short film by the same director, Jordan Vogt-Roberts, called "Successful Alcoholics." It's great to also bring an alumni back with their feature film, and someone who is going to, I think, be an interesting voice in the American comedy film scene.

Nuxoll: Yeah, he definitely falls into that category of guys doing interesting stuff in short form now who's now graduating to something bigger, and it's great to see.

Director: Destin Daniel Cretton
Stars: Brie Larson, John Gallagher Jr., Kaitlyn Dever, Rami Malek, Keith Stanfield, Kevin Hernandez, Melora Walters
Screening Date: July 20th

Nuxoll: Destin has this incredible ability to take these moments that can verge on really heavy melodrama—it can be really vague and emotional—but he brings this personal and honest touch to it so they never veer over into that realm of too much melodrama. We've screened his previous short before, but it's impressive to see him sustain that over the course of making a feature film. It really is a uniquely emotional experience.

And that's one we are co-presenting this year with a new partnership with the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. For the first time ever, they are co-presenting films outdoors and highlighting some of the really strong indie films that are coming through the system now. I think it will be a great for that film to reach a wide audience and get the recognition that it deserves when it hits theatrical release a few weeks after we show it.

It doesn't matter whether you're into indie films or more mainstream stuff, the film is undeniably affective for anyone who has seen it.

Director: Lotfy Nathan
Stars: Coco, Pug, Steven
Screening Date: August 8th

Rosenberg: The 12 O'Clock Boys is an amazing film. We first heard about it at IFC Week three years ago when Lotfy was just beginning to film the motorcycle gang. The story and the characters completely captivated instantly, just from seeing a couple of scenes years go.

It's also a film that really speaks to Rooftop's idea, particularly documentaries, in finding these very authentic, interesting and unique sub-cultures. It's sort of showing the way different people's hobbies, or passions, or the things that they do that define their lives, can also speak to larger issues in society and in local communities. Hopefully we'll have a bunch of the guys up from Baltimore as well to participate in the screening.

Director: Noah Baumbach
Stars: Greta Gerwig, Mickey Sumner, Adam Driver, Michael Zegen
Screening Date: May 11th

Nuxoll: Frances Ha is a fantastic film that we've been excited about for awhile. It's coming out in theaters via IFC films. I've known Noah from awhile ago because I was friends with his little brother in high school, but we've actually never shown one of Noah's films previously. We're excited that this is actually one of the first ones because I think it's a real love letter to New York City, and it absolutely fits the fact that we are showing it on a rooftop. It's a film that's very much paying tribute to not only NYC, but films about NYC.

When we looked at the timing for the screenings, it naturally fit to have it for the opening weekend, especially since we will be able to have Noah and Greta Gerwig attend. Greta's been in many movies that we've shown previously, so it'll be great to bring them together.

Director: Joe Swanberg
Stars: Olivia Wilde, Jake Johnson, Anna Kendrick, Ron Livingston, Ti West, Jason Sudeikis, Frank V. Ross, Mike Brune
Screening Date: June 27th

Nuxoll: It's film we are pretty psyched about, too. We've done some smaller screening of Joe's [Swanberg] stuff. We've known Joe forever and we've always really loved his stuff, but this will actually be our first outdoor presentation of his film. We've done a couple of smaller ones indoors because it always worked out scheduling-wise that whenever his films were possible for screening, it was always in the winter.

But yeah, Drinking Buddies is a film that's built on a lot of the strengths Joe has established over a really long time. He gets these extremely natural performances with natural dialogue and real genuine connection between his characters. Something we've always really championed is film and performances that show real people and how they live, and Joe's stuff is not showy and it's not false and fake.

And I think the movie was a big step forward for him, partly in structure, but partly in the charisma of the performances on top of the naturalism. It's really fun to see Olivia Wilde and Anna Kendrick in particular just bring this magnetism to these roles. It takes what he's doing to a whole new level—he'll be reaching wider audiences—and we will definitely have a lot of local beer on hand for that screening. I think it's a movie that's meant to be watched with a beer in your hand.

Director: Matthew Johnson
Stars: Matthew Johnson, Owen Williams, Krista Madison, Brandon Wickens
Screening Date: June 1st

Nuxoll: The Dirties was a fun one. That was a film that we had seen at Slamdance and was really well received there. The school shooting issue has been topical for a long time, but this was really an unconventional take on it. I think the film comes from an angle that's a little bit through-the-roof at first glance, and a little more complicated on the issue.

How common those tragedies have become influences young people, especially young men, in such a way that they have this really odd reaction. It's not that they are demoralized or horrified or terrified by it, it's more like they just take it as a fact of life. i think the film speaks to a kind of darker sensibility that I think a lot of young people have about these kinds of tragedies. This film's different treatment of that issue is something we haven't seen before and it definitely shows a lot of artistic courage on the part of the filmmakers and producers of the movie.

Director: David Lowery
Stars: Rooney Mara, Casey Affleck, Ben Foster, Nate Parker, Keith Carradine
Screening Date: August 15th

Rosenberg: Ain't Them Body Saints is one of the films we are really excited about at Rooftop because that was a film that received a grant from the Rooftop filmmakers fund. The Rooftop filmmakers fund, as you probably know, is a way that Rooftop as a film festival gives back to our filmmakers for not just the films that they've already made but for their future productions, so we've shown a couple short films and a feature film by David Lowery in the past.

Through the filmmaker fund, we made Ain't Them Body Saints a few years ago actually, when it was a much smaller production that didn't have the amazing stars that it has in it now. We gave it some of the first support that that film received by promising them some post-production work for effects and graphics, so it's a film that we've loved since the script stage. We were even more excited when Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara and Ben Foster got involved and it's turned out to be such an exciting film.

We all really love it for its sort of searing intensity and it being kind of an action movie or revenge drama that isn't filled with a lot of explosions and shoot-outs, but just has this constant slow burn of desperation and intensity to it. We are really excited to show that this summer and show it in a really special way, too. Audiences will get a unique treat for that film.