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JOURNAL
LOCAL INTELLIGENCE
The Palm Springs International Film Festival lands in early winter, and it is one of the handful of weeks a year that reliably fill the city. Screenings run at venues in and around downtown. For that stretch the restaurants on Palm Canyon Drive and Arenas Road are booked at every hour, and the sidewalks are busier than the weather alone would explain.
Visitors tend to picture the awards night and assume the rest is spectacle. It is not. Most of the festival is people sitting in cinemas watching international films that will never get a wide release here, and the screenings are where the value is. The gala is one evening. The programme runs a good deal longer than that.
It also arrives at a genuinely good time of year on its own terms. Days are warm and dry, nights are cold enough for a jacket, and the canyon hiking at the south end of South Palm Canyon Drive is at its best. If the festival is your reason for coming, the mornings are still free for everything else the city is good at.
Popular screenings sell out, and this is the kind of festival where residents have a schedule mapped before most visitors have booked a flight. Get the programme when it is published and choose your films before you arrive rather than at the box office.
Lodging is the harder constraint. Homes across the city fill months ahead for these weeks, minimum stays get longer, and rates rise everywhere rather than only near the venues. Large event weekends further east in the desert can tighten Palm Springs availability at the same time, so look at the whole calendar before you commit to a week.
Dates shift year to year, so confirm this year's with the festival before you plan a trip around them. Take the parking seriously too. Downtown parking in Palm Springs is normally easy and free, and on festival evenings it is neither. Stay within walking distance of Palm Canyon Drive if you can. If you cannot, park once for the whole evening rather than trying to move between venues by car, because the blocks around the cinemas are the slowest part of the city that week.