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The weather is just right for another season of the Rooftop Films Summer Series. The beloved annual festival is back, with IndieWire exclusively debuting the 2025 lineup. This year’s Summer Series will run from May 16 through August 22, and will include over 40 events, featuring new independent feature films, short film programs, family screenings, and live performances.

The U.S. premiere of Sean Byrne’s horror film “Dangerous Animals” is a highlight for the Rooftop Films slate; “Dangerous Animals” will have its world premiere during Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes before screening stateside at the Summer Series, with an in-person Q&a featuring director Byrne and cast members Jai Courtney, Hassie Harrison, and Josh Heuston on Thursday, May 22.

Non-profit Rooftop Films annually celebrates independent films and filmmakers with one of the world’s longest running and largest outdoor festivals for indie film. The screenings take place in outdoor venues across New York City’s five boroughs,...

Funk music has been around since the 1960s, developing out of gospel, R&b and soul, with a distinct emphasis on “syncopated bass lines and steady, infectious drum grooves,” according to one description. But that’s an awfully academic way of putting it.

The most important thing: Funk makes you want to dance.

We Want the Funk!, a new documentary premiering Tuesday night on PBS stations, will have you moving in your recliner, on your living room dance floor or wherever you watch it. Directors Stanley Nelson and Nicole London join the latest episode of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast to explore the music and its key innovators including James Brown, George Clinton and Sly Stone.

Doc Talk co-host John Ridley calls We Want the Funk! “perhaps the most joyous” cinematic work of the year. In addition to its broadcast premiere, the documentary is available on the PBS app and the PBS YouTube channel.

The Better Angels Society, the Library of Congress, and the Crimson Lion/Lavine Family Foundation have unveiled six finalists for the fifth annual Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film. Notably, veteran filmmaker Sam Pollard received two of the six noms.

The award, established in 2019, recognizes late-stage documentaries that use original research and a compelling narrative to tell stories that bring American history to life through archival materials.

The six projects that were selected are: Barak Goodman’s “Buckley,” Nicole London’s “The Disappearance of Miss. Scott,” Sam Pollard’s “The Harvest,” Peter Yost and Michael Rohatyn’s “Drop Dead City – New York on the Brink in 1975,” Sam Pollard and Ben Shapiro’s “Max Roach: The Drum Also Waltzes,” and Jason Cohn’s “Modernism Inc.: The Eliot Noyes Design Story.”

This year 125 American history documentary features were submitted for consideration.

“We’ve seen time and again what...

Exclusive: Buffalo 8 has set the digital release of Duality for October 21, Ryan Dowling’s documentary that was granted unprecedented access to an all-star roster of graffiti and street artists.

Once brushed aside – even deemed criminal – graffiti has since paved the way for many successful, credible artists today. With Duality, these street artists – some for the first time, some maintaining a strict code of anonymity – discuss their journeys from “tagging” to becoming respected icons in the cities they serve with pieces that are awe-inspiring in scope, size and complexity. They have collectively proven that their genre of art is something that can influence culture, evoke emotion, inspire, and cultivate community. Their rise has not been without challenges and criticism, but today they are admired by throngs of fans and oftentimes the art they produce brings in revenue for household brands and worldwide corporations. No longer relegated to back alleys, their works...

The premiere post-tiff destination (September 20-25th) in the film community and a major leg up for narrative and non-fiction films in development, the Independent Filmmaker Project (Ifp) announced a whopping 140 projects selected for the Project Forum at the upcoming Ifp Independent Film Week. Made up of several sections (Rbc’s Emerging Storytellers program, No Borders International Co-Production Market and Spotlight on Documentaries), we find latest updates from the likes of docu-helmers Doug Block (112 Weddings) and Lana Wilson (After Tiller), and among the narrative items we find headliners in Andrew Haigh (coming off the well received 45 Years), Sophie Barthes (Cold Souls and Madame Bovary), Terence Nance (An Oversimplification of Her Beauty), Lawrence Michael Levine (Wild Canaries), Jorge Michel Grau (We Are What We Are), Eleanor Burke and Ron Eyal (Stranger Things) and new faces in Sundance’s large family in Charles Poekel (Christmas, Again) and Olivia Newman (First Match). Here...