Glam, glitter, stars. This week’s Palm Springs International Film Festival is not only the first festival of the new year, but also a kick-off for the 2015 awards season. In Palm Springs, the stars were all in attendance at last Saturday’s exclusive night gala. The event’s honorees, many of whom were in attendance at the ceremony, included:
The Imitation Game – Ensemble Performance Award
David Oyelowo, Selma – Breakthrough Performance Award, Actor
Rosamund Pike, Gone Girl – Breakthrough Performance Award
Reese Witherspoon, Wild – Chairman’s Award
Eddie Redmayne, The Theory of Everything – Desert Palm Achievement Award – Actor
Julianne Moore, Still Alice – Desert Palm Achievement Award
Alejandro G. Inarritu, Birdman – Director of the Year Award
J.K. Simmons, Whiplash – Spotlight Award
Richard Linklater, Boyhood – Sonny Bono Visionary Award
Robert Duvall, The Judge – Icon Award
Films, films, films. For film fans with no connections to Hollywood, the festival offers 190 high-caliber indie films with topical themes and great storytelling. The line-up includes 65 premieres of highly anticipated films, with an emphasis international cinema. One category highlights 20 films from Central and Eastern European filmmaking in a special focus titled Eastern Promises. As festival patrons enter each screening, they are given a ballot to rate the selection from 1 to 5. In an informal survey of fans in line during the atypically cold opening weekend, all were raving about each of the films they had seen, rating none less than a 4.
Palm Springs is a destination film festival, meaning that film enthusiasts from locations as far as Canada make their way to the desert for the experience of watching innovative films as well as star-gazing. The central location of the festival is the comfortably appointed Regal 9 theaters in downtown Palm Springs. Many of the films are shown in multiple theaters, so tickets are generally available, as are seats. The festival’s opening night film Selma about Martin Luther King’s march in 1965 credits Brad Pitt and Oprah Winfrey among the producers and has been nominated for four Golden Globe Awards.
The festival will continue through Sunday, January 11 with many more independent and some big budget films. The festival will close with Boychoir, directed by François Girard, about a troubled 12-year-old from a disadvantaged background who becomes accepted at an elite music school, The National Boychoir Academy. He engages in a battle of wills with a tough taskmaster, the school’s Choirmaster. The film stars Dustin Hoffman, Garrett Wareing, Kathy Bates, Eddie Izzard, Kevin McHale, Josh Lucas and Debra Winger.
For schedule and tickets, psfilmfest.org/festival
Karen Henry is an Associate Editor at LA YOGA who volunteers in a variety of capacities for nonprofit organizations and artists around Los Angeles. She practices yoga as a counterbalance to her daily impact sports and is a mother of four grown children who also practice yoga . Now, she’s working on teaching yoga and joy of life to the grandkids!