Cinematic Sedona

Cathedral Rock appeared in Broken Arrow

This week, Sedona hosts its eighteenth annual International Film Festival, when more than a hundred movies unreel around town. It’s a fabulous event, and a wonderful time to be here, when bleary-eyed movie-goers can step from the theater into bright sunshine and the promise of spring, with fruit trees and daffodils blossoming around West Sedona, and wildflowers beginning to show up along forest trails.

Film buffs who are new to Sedona might feel a sense of déjà vu when they take in the local red rock landscape. No wonder, since more than eighty movies have been made in the Sedona area, many of them during the golden age of Westerns. For years, a Western town set stood in West Sedona (where a housing development is today), appearing in several films, including John Wayne’s Angel and the Badman (1946). A local hotel (now home to the wonderful Elote Café) was once the site of a soundstage. The area around Bell Rock (now the Village of Oak Creek) made a dramatic backdrop for The Rounders (1964) and other films, and the area of the Broken Arrow Trail was a key location in—you guessed it-- Broken Arrow (1950), starring Jimmy Stewart. 

Even today, traffic occasionally comes to a standstill while cameras roll for a commercial, television episode, or feature film. Every couple years, rumors surface about building a movie museum here, but for now, the best place to learn about the area’s Hollywood past is at the Sedona Heritage Museum, where an entire room is dedicated to Sedona’s cinematic history. 

The film festival usually includes a few local filmmakers, some of them students at Sedona's Zaki Gordon Institute. A few years back, I worked on a film script for producer/director RJ Joseph. It was quite a thrill to sit in a dark theater and hear my words during Che Ah Chi, a visually stunning documentary about the Native American history of Boynton Canyon, today home to Enchantment Resort. 


Sedona's film festival continues through Sunday, February 26. See you at the movies!