EL SEGUNDO, Calif. — Some of the buzzy stars you saw at Sunday's Golden Globe Awards can also be spotted at another prestigious Southern California film event this week.

The 2025 Palm Springs International Film Festival kicked off Thursday and will run until Jan. 13. The film society's artistic director, Lili Rodriguez, recently opened up to Spectrum News — after connecting about a previous iteration back in 2021 — about highlights to expect throughout the rest of the 2025 schedule.

"We have a lineup that is very heavily into international cinema, and we do a lot of work specifically with the best international feature film Oscar category," Rodriguez said. "So we're going to be showing about 35 of those titles."

The international category in each Academy Awards ceremony is usually narrowed down to just five features, so the Palm Springs festival allows for the directors behind the rest of the contenders to continue spreading their wings in the meantime.

"It's so great because, you know, they've been doing the circuit, they've been doing campaigns, and Palm Springs is where they get to meet each other and, like, hang out and talk to each other, which is always really lovely," Rodriguez said. "And they get to ask each other about their movies and what it's been like for them. So we love doing that here."

The festival is also offering its fair share of movies with commercial appeal, as it opened Thursday with a featured presentation of Paramount Pictures' Robbie Williams biopic "Better Man" and includes other films that aren't yet accessible in North American theaters. Rodriguez is excited that "The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie" — which doesn't release in the U.S. until late February — is included in the 2025 PSIFF lineup.

Added to that, there are the coveted film awards that welcome Hollywood talent to Palm Springs every year. The Golden Globe-showered Netflix film "Emilia Pérez," for example, received the prestigious Vanguard Award on Friday.

"We have some of Hollywood's biggest names doing Q&As with us. So far, we have, you know, pretty much everyone in 'Emilia Pérez,'" Rodriguez said. "And we have Colman Domingo with 'Sing Sing.'"

To find out how to attend the 2025 festival, including ticket and pass purchasing, visit here.