Film festival season is winter in Palm Springs

Event · Palm Springs

When is film festival season in Palm Springs?

Winter. Palm Springs has a long-running international film festival held in the early part of the year, plus a separate short-film festival at another point in the calendar, and the winter edition is the one that fills the city: screenings at downtown venues, an awards event, and a noticeable change in who is walking along Palm Canyon Drive for a couple of weeks.

Visitors fly in for a few days and try to cram in four screenings. Living here for the whole run is a different proposition. You can take the weekday daytime screenings nobody fights over, walk to a downtown venue instead of hunting for parking, and go home in between rather than killing three hours somewhere. The interesting films are rarely the ones with a line outside.

Watch for the program when it is announced and choose by schedule as much as by title. Weekday matinees are the resident's slot: thinner crowds, easier seating, and no competition from the weekend influx. Passes and individual tickets both exist, and if you are here for the whole run the arithmetic on a pass works out sooner than it would for someone in town briefly. And walk. Downtown Palm Springs is compact and the venues sit close together, which is unusual for a desert city and makes an evening of two screenings easy without touching the car.

The festival sits in winter for the same reason the whole Palm Springs season does. November through April is when the weather is dependably good, the city is full and everything is open. It is also when homes are hardest to get: the winter months book out early, often by early autumn for the following year, because snowbirds take the same homes for the same months annually. If you want to be here for the run, the binding constraint is housing, not tickets.

The honest tradeoff of being here in the thick of the season: downtown is busy, Highway 111 is slow, parking near the venues is poor, and restaurant tables need planning. The compensations are real. The weather is at its best, the mountains often carry snow while you are in short sleeves, and the city feels properly alive in a way it does not in August, when highs commonly between 108 and 115 degrees empty it out. If crowds wear on you, base yourself a few blocks off the Palm Canyon Drive corridor rather than on it, and walk in.

If you're here for a month or more

Time the stay to contain the run rather than match it. A month that includes the festival gives you the weekday screenings, the quieter days either side, and no pressure to see everything — and you keep a full kitchen and in-home laundry while the people who flew in are eating out for every meal. If you want to be walkable to the downtown venues without sitting in the middle of the traffic, ask your local manager which nearby streets absorb the overflow.