70mm Film Festival to Show in Palm Springs This Weeekend

Cinephiles in Southern California are in for a treat this weekend when the Palm Springs 70mm Film Festival gets underway.

According to the event’s website, the festival “showcases iconic films in spectacular 70mm, inviting audiences to experience cinema the way it was meant to be seen.”

The lineup includes all-time classics like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Boogie Nights, and Lawrence of Arabia.

All the screenings are taking place at the historic Camelot Theatre at the Palm Springs Cultural Center. The festival’s technical director, Roger Adams, tells USA Today that the theater was specifically designed to show 70mm. “The original screen was a lot deeper dish curve; it was a D150 screen,” he says.

“It’s so special to be able to bring 70mm film here to Palm Springs,” adds the festival’s director and producer, Lauren Wolfer. “It’s rare; there are not many theaters left in the country where you can see this.”

Wolfer says that in a digital age, where everything is driven by AI, people are “craving” the very physical media of 70mm. “You have an ultra high-resolution, amazing clarity, but then there are imperfections. You’ll see little scratches here and there. It’s such a big part of the experience. It kind of adds to the warmth and the texture.”

The 70mm format has seen a revival in recent years, thanks to directors like Christopher Nolan and Ryan Coogler. 70mm film is almost 3.5 times larger than standard 35mm film. All that extra negative space allows for high-resolution, a sharper picture, and richer colors.

But 70mm is a specialized format, and it requires a skilled technician to operate. Some 70mm theaters hoping to put on screenings of Nolan’s upcoming epic The Odyssey are struggling to find a projectionist up to the task.

Speaking of Nolan, the auteur shot The Odyssey entirely on IMAX cameras, which is actually an even bigger format than 70mm. Whereas 70mm runs through the projectors horizontally with frames that are five perforations tall, IMAX runs sideways through the camera and projector, meaning each frame is an enormous 15 perforations. It also means that the IMAX aspect ratio is much taller than 70mm, which has a classic wide rectangle aspect ratio.