In its fourth year, the Borrego Springs Film Festival will run January 12-16 at the Borrego Springs Performing Arts Center. The festival has quickly become the "filmmaker's festival" with top-notch films, well-attended screenings and many filmmakers in attendance. It seems founder Fred Jee was on to something when he decided to pour his heart and soul into this signature project.

This year the film lineup is topped by award-winning writer and director Rodrigo Garcia's "Last Days in the Desert" starring Ewan McGregor, and filmed by Oscar-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. Borregans will no doubt thrill to Lubezki's camera work which was shot on location in the Borrego Badlands.

The film is 98 minutes long and is scheduled to be screened on Monday afternoon at no charge and open to the public, first come first-served.

The festival will include 61 films including 5 features, 6 Latino films, 10 animated films, 15 documentaries, and 25 short films. The quality of the films is astounding, with all competing films having been rated 8 or better out of 10 stars by our film review team.

Tickets will be available starting soon at the BSFF 2017 website.

Full-festival passes are $125 each, and include admission to all events and an opportunity to claim a ticket for all films.

Please note that the only way to guarantee admission to a particular film is to purchase a ticket online for $10 per screening session.

Another thing to remember is that even after all full-fest passes are sold, a number of tickets will be available online for individual screening sessions. Ticket sales at the door will commence 10 minutes prior to the scheduled screening time.

All Monday, January 16 screenings are free and open to the public. What that means is that most if not all screenings will be fully attended, and latecomers will probably not be seated.