Cinema Cities
Studios, backlots and festival red carpets make these cities pilgrimage sites of the moving image. Cinema cities let you step through the screen — the street you recognise is the destination.
A cinema city is one where film is an industry or an institution with a place attached, not a location that once appeared on screen.
Landscape as a resource. The Tabernas desert is the only true desert in continental Europe, which is why it played Arizona and Mexico for around two hundred films and still keeps three western towns standing.
The festival is the mechanism. Locarno seats eight thousand in a public square in front of a screen twenty-six metres wide; Telluride refuses to publish its programme in advance, so ticket-holders arrive not knowing what they will see; Sundance moved to a closed silver-mining town in 1981 and made independent film an industry.
Production needs infrastructure. Ramoji Film City has permanent sets across sixteen hundred acres and a production can arrive with a script and leave with a finished film.
Restoration counts. Bologna's laboratory restores world cinema and projects the results free in the main square each summer.
Check the dates before you book; these towns have two states.