Palm Springs film fest full of pleasant surprises

PALM SPRINGS, Calif. — Receiving only a fraction of the worldwide attention of our own Sundance Film Festival is another 12-days-in-January festival in a far more hospitable clime — the Palm Springs International Film Festival.

The days are warm and sunny, festivalgoers wear shorts and sandals, parking is never a major problem and, most important, the wider range of film fare is far less apt to shock and offend.

But that's not to say, just because the local clientele in the Palm Springs/Palm Desert area leans more toward retirees and senior citizens, that the selection of films is more stodgy and sentimental. Not at all. But it does seem to offer a much broader variety of choices.

Best of all, the Palm Springs festival does something that none of the other hundreds of festivals sprinkled all around the world seem to do — it contacts all of the film industries from around the world to see which film each country has chosen to submit to the U.S. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as its nomination for the best-foreign film Oscar.

Then all of those films are invited to be screened, along with two or three hundred other films, at the festival, which is two months before the Academy Awards.

Films from more than 50 countries were shown in Palm Springs last month — and those were just various countries' Oscar nominees!

In addition to the Awards Buzz category, there are several other series offered — including Awards Buzz-Documentaries, Global Lens 2006, Modern Masters Showcase, New Voices/New Visions, Focus Italy, Cine Latino Showcase, Spotlight on Chilean Cinema, World Cinema Now, Supercharged Cinema, Non-Fiction Features and even Archival Treasures.

The variety is absolutely staggering.

• All five of the foreign-language Oscar nominees that were announced this week were among those films screened at Palm Springs — "Paradise Now," from Palestine; "Tsotsi," from South Africa; "Don't Tell," from Italy; "Sophie Scholl: The Final Days," from Germany; and "Joyeux Noel," from France.

The French entry is the kind of film the Oscar often goes to, yet the Palestinian movie, dealing with suicide bombers, is a very important topic these days.