Consider the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA) at 227 State St. your experimental film destination this August, especially with the unfortunate shuttering of UW Cinematheque after a burst water supply line in June.

Rooftop Cinema returns to MMoCA's sculpture garden on four consecutive Thursday nights starting July 30, through the efforts of programmer James Kreul.

Rooftop Cinema has been a summer night fixture since 2006, with audiences basking in the screen's glow on their folding chairs and blankets. Originally guided by Tom Yoshikami, who departed for Canada in 2015, the series often highlighted a tonal and stylistic range of animated shorts.

When Kreul took over in 2018 after a few years of Yoshikami's remote work, he wanted to push further into "feature programs or existing touring packages of shorts," he writes via email. Kreul says that Yoshikami expressed a greater appreciation for art cinema in his 12 years. But both share "an interest in showing people things that they probably wouldn't see if they were looking for films on their own,” Kreul says. 

That further speaks to the value of Rooftop, and a mid-size city like Madison surpassing expectations for the film selections at public screenings. Flix Brewhouse at East Towne Mall, for example, leans into a roster of comfort titles for its Camp Flix and Flix Picks over the summer. 

Rooftop is operating in a more explorative niche, as it premieres uniquely assembled programs, new works, and restored cult features. Since 2021, when the series moved from Fridays in June to Thursdays in August (primarily to accommodate earlier start times), viewers could rely on a music-related documentary or concert film and an animated feature. But this year, Kreul is switching things up.

This is, in part, due to Kreul's recent promotion at MMoCA from freelancer to assistant curator for film and art video. This allows him to program video more regularly in the video gallery and lecture hall inside the museum, like the current exhibition, Films by Bill Bedford, so he feels "less obligated to show as much experimental work as I could at Rooftop. Having more screen time to play with opens up a lot of possibilities," Kreul writes. 

First in the Rooftop series on July 30 is an 80-minute video compilation of absurdist performance art sketches, Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape, assembled by Kelli's widower, Jordan Wippel, and filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun (Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma). The late Kelli's postmodernist short-form videos from 2013 through 2019 lampooned influencer and celebrity-consumed culture even before the true rise of the TikTok feed.

Like Kreul's pick of Ryan Trecartin's I-Be Area (2007) for Rooftop in 2025, Girl Internet Show underlines Kreul's fascination with the intermingling of video and performance art histories. "Much of the rhetoric of experimental and alternative film and video had suggested that media could be very different if the technology were in the hands of the people," Kreul says. "The vast majority of what is posted on YouTube or social media looks nothing like what video and film artists had hoped for." Maybe in that way, communally watching Kati Kelli's work can be a softly defiant act against a current zeitgeist dominated by shills, bots, and surveillance-state technocrats.

On Aug. 6, America: Everything You've Ever Dreamed Of contains a whopping 11 eccentric documentaries — all between four and 10 minutes — by the duo of Tony Ganz and Rhody Streeter. Most were completed over a prolific three-year period in the early 1970s. The films make good on the suggestion of the program's title. As predecessors of Errol Morris (Gates of Heaven), Ganz and Streeter observe our nation's contradictions with aplomb.

The first four films — Best of Your Life (1971), Honeymoon Hotel (1971), Risen Indeed (1972), and Women Unlimited (1972) — concern a retirement community, a destination for newlyweds, a militant Christian sect, and a subjugating school for women, respectively. They depict a regressive America and drive home how the country became primed for Ronald Reagan by the end of the decade. A few declarations by interviewees are as brazenly, bizarrely funny as they are troubling.

Other shorts venture into other parts of the country to provide succinct character portraits, like a Canadian runaway temporarily taking refuge in the Big Apple, addicts and unhoused in lower Manhattan, sign painters showing off their trade in fast-motion, and a data analyst's look at the origins of Muzak (which is, in all honesty, not unlike a scene in Albert Brooks's Real Life). The particular standout, though, is Help-Line (1972), which gives modern viewers a sympathetic, slice-of-life insight into a loneliness epidemic that existed more than 50 years ago.

Aug. 13's selection is Gangsterism (2025), a new Canadian microbudget feature from Isiah Medina (88:88). Drawing from the experimental, politically charged essay film pioneered by Jean-Luc Godard in the late 1960s, Medina's presentation is immediately confrontational in both form and content. The frenetic montage approach to editing and the dialogue's philosophical, rhetorical rigor at times recall the writing of indie darling Hal Hartley. At its core, the fragmented meta-plot concerns conflicted film director Clem (Mark Bacolcol), contemplating his identity as a Filipino-Canadian artist with his partner Ez (Kalil Haddad) and cadre of academic associates.

As it progresses, Gangsterism actively deconstructs its own aims and the function of the feature film in our time (one of the film's subtle running gags includes plays on Steven Spielberg's name). And it directly addresses microaggressions against marginalized people, who have been historically demoted in white-priviledged film spaces. Even at succinct 84 minutes, the experimental feature's tracing of alienation is remarkably dense and disarming. With a queer and subversive streak, the "photoplay" borrows equally from theater and literature references, and belongs in the same conversation as Ephraim Asili's The Inheritance (2020). Gangsterism is, above all, an intellectually restless endeavor, as we hear Clem desperately plead to "get something done before history ends again" in the initial stretch.

Rooftop's final night on Aug. 20, which overlaps with the Madison Night Market along State Street, offers the season's lengthiest feature at 135 minutes: the Soviet dystopian sci-fi comedy Kin-Dza-Dza! (1986). Kreul pitches it as "Andrei Tarkovsky directing Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," which is why he is especially interested in watching the film with a crowd. The film channels Kreul's "growing interest in distributors like American Genre Film Archive (AGFA), which have public exhibition rights to films available on boutique Blu-ray labels," he adds. "Even though these titles are available on home video, most people won't see them (or even know about them) unless someone showcases them," Kreul reiterates one of his main goals for the summer series and his broader programming methodology.

All four will screen digitally on files or a disc, through a portable sound rack and powerful stereo speaker setup. The first showing on July 30 starts at 9 p.m.. Screenings on Aug. 6 and 13 start at 8:30 p.m., and on Aug. 20 at 8:15 p.m.