In the last scene of the film, our heroine races into the stairwell. The final conflict looms, and she has two options: up to the roof or down to the street. She chooses the roof, because the rooftop represents her last refuge, her only hope of escape. And because rooftops are inherently cinematic.
Following her to the roof, we might find a lush garden or tarpaper, a pool or a watertower, a skyscraper party with river views or the heroine alone, climbing through the hatchway of the shortest building around. But we find that life is different on the roof. In a flash we can see distance and detail—look at how the church steeples line up with the bridge towers. We discover an abandoned playground on top of a temple. We're out in the open, but hidden from the life beneath us, both on the ground and inside the buildings. We can hop from house to house for miles perhaps, spying on the world below. We become voyeurs, catburglars, superheroes, suicide cases, pursued victims of horror films. Up here, life becomes a movie.
So we screen films on a rooftop, films which seek out a new perspective. Films which find that one last secret in the final confrontation between the hero and the villain. Short films, which exalt in the single moment—the revelation—yet explore that moment ferociously, as vertigo sets in. We support filmmakers who claw their way to the roof and force themselves to the ledge so they can show us something new, something beautiful, something true about the world around us which we always knew was there but have never been able to see. Fiction, documentary, experimental: we screen films that you could only watch here.
This is the eighth year of this festival, but cinema has always been on the rooftop.
