May 29, 2026

BSFI Free Summer Movies in June 2026 at BSPAC!

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BSFI Free Movies Continue at BSPAC with June Screenings

How the time flies when we’re watching really good movies! It’s already June – the third month of our free movie screenings program at BSPAC – and we’re settling into a hot summer of great cinema, screening every other Wednesday, through the end of December.

 

All screenings are held on Wednesday evenings at 7pm at the Borrego Springs Performing Arts Center, 590 Palm Canyon Drive, Borrego Springs, CA 92004. 

 

Our newly updated full schedule for 2026 is posted on the BSFI website:  www.borregospringsfilminstitute.org. Please note due to the vagaries of film licensing, the schedule is always subject to change, so please check the website for the most up to date information.

 

Here are the movies coming to BSPAC in June:

 

Wednesday, June 3, 2026 at 7pm – High and Low – 1963 – Not Rated – 2h 23m

 

High and Low, known in Japanese as Tengoku to Jigoku ("Heaven and Hell"), is widely regarded as one of the masterworks of world cinema. It is a Japanese police procedural directed by Akira Kurosawa, written by Kurosawa along with Hideo Oguni, Eijirō Hisaita, and Ryūzō Kikushima, and loosely adapted from the 1959 novel King's Ransom by Evan Hunter (writing as Ed McBain). Toshirō Mifune stars as Kingo Gondō, a wealthy shoe company industrialist whose family becomes the target of a cold-blooded kidnapper — though in a cruel twist, the kidnappers accidentally snatch the son of Gondō's chauffeur rather than his own child yet still demand an enormous ransom. The film's genius lies in its bold structural shift: the first half is a tense moral drama confined to Gondō's penthouse suite, where he wrestles with whether to ruin himself financially to save another man's child, while the second half descends to the street-level slums of Yokohama as the police, led by Chief Detective Tokura (Tatsuya Nakadai), scour the city for the kidnapper. Tsutomu Yamazaki appears in a small but pivotal role as the kidnapper, showcasing considerable depth and leaving a lasting impression. Released in Japan in 1963, High and Low became the highest-grossing film at the Japanese box office that year. Critically, the film was celebrated both at home and abroad — Rotten Tomatoes describes it as "meticulously crafted" and "an enthralling procedural imbued with weighty moral heft." The film was entered into the Official Selection at the Venice Film Festival in September 1963 and was nominated for Best Foreign Film at the Golden Globe Awards in 1964.  Its reputation has only grown with time, with critics consistently praising Kurosawa's movement from a riveting race-against-time thriller to exacting social commentary, creating a diabolical treatise on class and contemporary Japanese society.  In Japanese with English subtitles.

 

Wednesday, June 17, 2026 at 7pm – Hard Truths – 2024 – Rated R – 1h 37m

 

Hard Truths is a fierce and deeply compassionate drama set in London, written and directed by Mike Leigh, starring Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Michele Austin, and David Webber.  Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, a woman so full of rage that every interaction devolves into lashing out — whether at her utterly cowed husband and son, or random strangers who have the temerity to address her. In contrast, her younger sister Chantelle (Austin) lives with her two vivacious daughters and runs a successful hairdressing business, putting clients at ease all day long. Yet beneath Pansy's abrasive exterior are hints of a more fragile psyche, one motivated by fear and damaged by repressed pain. Jean-Baptiste and Austin were reunited with Leigh for the first time since his multiple Oscar-nominated film, Secrets & Lies. The film was written and developed by Leigh using his characteristic method of close collaboration with his actors. It premiered at the 49th Toronto International Film Festival in September 2024. Commercially Hard Truths was a modest arthouse release, earning a worldwide total of $1.6 million.  Critically, however, the film was a triumph: with Rotten Tomatoes’ consensus praising Jean-Baptiste's "prickly masterclass" and calling it "another superb character study from writer-director Mike Leigh," and it was named one of the top ten independent films of 2024 by the National Board of Review. On the awards front, Jean-Baptiste's performance generated enormous attention: she received Best Actress nominations at the Critics' Choice Awards, the BAFTA Film Awards, and the Gotham Awards, and swept the Best Actress trifecta at the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the National Society of Film Critics, becoming the first woman of color to do so.

 

And looking forward, here are the scheduled movies through the rest of the summer: 

 

Wednesday, July 1, 2026 at 7pm – Raiders of the Lost Ark – 1981 – PG – 1h 45m


Continuing our “Summer Blockbuster” tradition in July, Steven Spielberg's genre-defining adventure follows the irresistible archaeologist Indiana Jones — played by Harrison Ford — as he races Nazi operatives across the globe to claim the legendary Ark of the Covenant before it can be weaponized for world domination. Crackling with wit, spectacle, and irresistible momentum, the film reinvented the action-adventure genre by channeling the spirit of 1930s serials through a thoroughly modern cinematic lens. Few films are as purely, unabashedly fun — and it remains one of Hollywood's most beloved and influential blockbusters.

 

Wednesday, July 15, 2026 at 7pm – The Great McGinty – 1940 – Not Rated – 1h 22m


Preston Sturges made his directorial debut with this razor-sharp political comedy, following small-time opportunist Dan McGinty (Brian Donlevy) as he claws his way from street-level muscle to the mayor's office — courtesy of a thoroughly corrupt political machine. Trouble arrives when McGinty falls genuinely in love with his marriage-of-convenience wife and makes the catastrophic mistake of trying to do the right thing. Wickedly funny and surprisingly pointed, it set the template for Sturges' celebrated run of Hollywood satires that followed.

 

Wednesday, July 29, 2026 at 7pm – A Simple Plan – 1998 – Rated R – 2h 1m


When three men stumble upon a crashed plane carrying over four million dollars in cash in the snowy woods outside their small town, what seems like a stroke of impossible luck quickly curdles into something far darker. Director Sam Raimi's tense and deeply moral thriller — anchored by Bill Paxton and a remarkable Billy Bob Thornton — charts with quiet precision how greed, fear, and small compromises can unravel ordinary lives. It is a modern fable about the price of keeping secrets, and one of the most underrated American films of its decade.

 

Wednesday, August 12, 2026 at 7pm – Can You Ever Forgive Me? – 2018 – Rated R – 1h 47m


Melissa McCarthy delivers a career-defining dramatic performance as Lee Israel, a down-and-out biographer in 1990s New York who turns to forging letters by literary legends to keep herself afloat. Directed by Marielle Heller, the film is both a sharp-edged portrait of literary obsession and a surprisingly tender story of loneliness and self-destruction. Richard E. Grant shines as her raffish accomplice, and the film lingers long after the credits as a meditation on talent, desperation, and the lies we tell ourselves.

 

Wednesday, August 26, 2026 at 7pm – Chinatown – 1974 – Rated R – 2h 10m


Roman Polanski's landmark neo-noir remains one of the most perfectly constructed films ever made, following Los Angeles private detective J.J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson) as a seemingly routine infidelity case pulls him into a labyrinth of corruption, murder, and devastating family secrets. With Faye Dunaway as the enigmatic Mrs. Mulwray and John Huston as a villain of quietly monstrous authority, the film operates as both a flawless thriller and a cynical elegy for American idealism. Robert Towne's Oscar-winning screenplay is a masterclass in plotting, and its ending remains one of cinema's most haunting.

 

This season’s BSFI movie screenings are being generously underwritten by the Borrego Valley Endowment Fund (BVEF).

 

See you at the movies!





Learn More About Borrego Springs

The Great Summer Triangle | Week of July 19-25, 2026

By Dennis Mammana • July 14, 2026
By Dennis Mammana Week of July 19-25, 2026 We can spend our time under the stars trying to find constellation figures from mythological times, but we'll always have limited success. If we really want to see pictures among the stars, I'm afraid we need to create our own. You may remember from previous articles that constellations are simply areas of the sky, and do not resemble their namesakes. Corvus looks nothing like a crow. Trying to find a bear in Ursa Major? Fuhgetaboutit! And Scorpius, the scorpion ... well, OK, there will always be one exception. No, if you want to see pictures among the stars, you must invent your own. And that's where asterisms come in. An asterism is a group of stars that we connect in our imaginations to look like something. Some of the easiest of these to create are geometrical figures. If you ever took a geometry class, you may recall that a point is the simplest of these — a figure with no length, width or depth. In the sky, every star forms a point; connect any three of these, and you'll create a triangle. One in particular, though, is different. It's larger and brighter, and we can find it midway up in our eastern sky after dark. It's called the Summer Triangle. It's not a constellation but rather an asterism made of three stars from three separate constellations, but that doesn't mean that early storytellers overlooked this prominent star grouping. For example, an ancient Chinese love tale tells that the star Deneb represents a magpie bridge over the Milky Way, which allows the separated lovers Altair and Vega to be reunited on only one summer night each year.  The brightest of the stellar trio — and highest in the sky this week — is Vega, the most prominent star in the constellation of Lyra, the harp. It lies 150 trillion miles from us (about 25 lightyears); in other words, the light arriving tonight from Vega began its journey toward our eyes in 2001. The southeasternmost of the three stars is Altair, the brightest in the constellation of Aquila, the eagle. Its name comes from the Arabic Al Nasr al Tair, meaning in English "the flying eagle." Altair lies about 96 trillion miles (17 lightyears) from us. Not only is Altair one of the nearest stars, it's also one of the most rapidly spinning, completing one rotation in just 6.5 hours! Finally, farthest to the northeast lies Deneb, marking the tail of the great swan Cygnus, more easily recognized as the Northern Cross. It's not certain, but we think that Deneb could lie as far away as 2,600 lightyears from Earth. If it's truly that distant, this star could be one of the most brilliant in our entire galaxy, with a luminosity equivalent to 200,000 suns, and would generate more light in one day than our sun has produced since the days of Marco Polo at the end of the 13th century! With the overwhelmingly bright moonlight this week and next, the brightest stars are about all we'll be able to see, but you can still head outdoors to check out the brightest of the summer — the Summer Triangle. Visit Dennis Mammana at dennismammana.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com . Learn More About Borrego Springs

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Cool Off at the Borrego Art Institute with Free Root Beer Floats on July 18

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Lost Acreage Brought Gale Gordon To Desert | Historic Borrego Sun

By Andrea McKenna • July 13, 2026
From the Borrego Sun archives Gale Gordon was best known for his longtime work with Lucille Ball on The Lucy Show and Here’s Lucy. He also appeared in I Love Lucy, Our Miss Brooks and Dennis the Menace. Gordon later made Borrego Springs his home, living on a Tub Canyon ranch and serving as honorary mayor. This 1969 article tells how a search for land purchased by his mother led him to the desert. ------- Originally published in the Borrego Sun on June 21, 1969. HE FOUND PEACE Lost Acreage Brought Gale Gordon To Desert It’s not difficult to find a reason for moving to Borrego Springs. But for actor Gale Gordon it was even less difficult. He came to Borrego 40 years ago to find 10 lost acres his mother, English actress Gloria Gordon, had purchased for speculation, but no one knew where they were. Gale, today the honorary mayor of Borrego Springs, couldn’t find them, according to a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, and in subsequent trips he fell in love with the desert. “When I bought Tub Canyon,” he told the Times writer, Cecil Smith, “I brought an expert surveyor down to check my property lines, and while he was here I sent him to look for Mother’s land. He couldn’t find it. “Just a few years ago, a man wrote me asking me if he could have an easement for a road over Mother’s 10 acres to his property. I told him I’d give him the easement if he’d show it to me. Now, at last, I know where it is.” In the Times article, Smith wrote: “Some people are frightened by the desert. The solitude disturbs them. Across the mountains at Palm Springs there is glitter and clamor and neon dazzle where tourists and movie stars gambol. “Though show folk own great tracts of Borrego (among them Bing Crosby, Jascha Heifetz, Chuck Connors, Eddie Albert and Margo), there is here quiet, muted peace.” Gale obviously agrees, in his words:  “When I get in my car to come here I can feel the tensions slacken, the muscles relax. By the time I’m here, I’m a different man and Hollywood seems light-years away. The desert is like the sea, an ever-changing thing that never changes. I guess I come here to find my soul."

Lunar Eclipse Spectacular Coming to Borrego Springs

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From Borrego Springs to Arles: A Week at the World’s Largest Photography Festival

By Brice Weaver • July 12, 2026
By: Brice Weaver www.briceweaverphotography As I write this, I’m traveling home from Arles, France, after spending the past week participating in the Photo Folio Portfolio Reviews during Les Rencontres d’Arles, one of the world’s largest and most respected photography festivals.  For one week each summer, the historic city in southern France becomes a gathering place for photographers, curators, publishers, editors, gallery directors, and artists from around the world. Photography spills out of galleries and into churches, museums, former industrial buildings, courtyards, and public spaces. It feels less like a festival and more like a city-wide conversation. I traveled to Arles to present Evidence, a long-term photographic project exploring memory, environmental change, and the traces people leave behind in the landscape. The work brings together photographs made at California’s Salton Sea, in Patagonia, and throughout Southern California. Getting there was the culmination of months of preparation. Photographs were selected, removed, rearranged, printed, and reconsidered. Like many photographers, I spend most of my time working alone. Arles is the opposite of that experience. Suddenly, you’re surrounded by people from dozens of countries, all there because photography matters to them. The portfolio reviews took place over five days. Each meeting lasted just twenty minutes, but those twenty minutes moved quickly. Some conversations focused on environmental themes. Others centered on publishing, exhibitions, sequencing, or the future of the project. Some people responded strongly to Evidence as a complete body of work, while others became interested in one particular chapter and wanted to spend most of our time discussing it. What became clear very quickly was that there was no single way to read the project. Different people saw different things in the same photographs. At times the conversations confirmed ideas I already had. At other times they took the work in directions I hadn’t considered. By the end of the week, I had pages of notes and plenty to think about on the flight home. One thing I appreciated was that the discussions rarely stayed focused on photography alone. Conversations often expanded into larger subjects: environmental change, memory, history, the passage of time, and the complicated relationship between people and the places they inhabit. Between reviews, I spent as much time as possible exploring the festival. Arles is forever associated with Vincent van Gogh, who moved there in 1888 and produced some of the most important work of his career. More than a century later, artists are still making the journey. Walking through the city, it wasn’t difficult to understand why. The light is extraordinary, and creativity seems woven into everyday life. The exhibitions themselves were remarkable. One might be housed inside a centuries-old church, while another occupied a former warehouse or industrial building. In a single afternoon, it was possible to move from contemporary photography addressing climate change or migration to Roman artifacts that had survived for nearly two thousand years. At one museum, a cat slept quietly among the visitors and ancient stonework, completely unfazed by the steady stream of people passing through. The city was filled with photographers carrying portfolios through narrow streets between review sessions and exhibitions. Conversations started in galleries and continued in cafés. Everywhere I went, people were exchanging ideas, discussing projects, debating books, and sharing experiences. Coming from Borrego Springs, I couldn’t help noticing how often the subjects being discussed in France felt familiar. Landscape. Water. Environmental change. Human impact. Memory. The locations were different, but many of the questions were the same. That felt especially relevant given the origins of Evidence. Much of the project grew from places close to home, particularly the Salton Sea and the changing landscapes of Southern California. Seeing those photographs spark conversations with people from different countries and backgrounds was one of the most rewarding parts of the experience. As the week came to an end, photographers were still moving through the city with portfolios tucked under their arms, heading toward another exhibition, another review, or another conversation. A few hours later, I was on a train leaving Arles, carrying home a notebook full of ideas, new professional connections, and a renewed appreciation for the role photography can play in connecting people and places that might otherwise never meet. For a photographer from a small desert community, it was a week I won’t soon forget.

July 15: Free Screening of The Great McGinty at BSPAC

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