Seventeen minutes into the offbeat indie rom-com Everything & the Universe, a woman walks into a hotel to check in for a weekend stay. The hotel lobby is bright and airy, with a wall of glass windows near the reception desk and a cream-and-crimson carpet underfoot.
It was here that my sister-in-law, Annie, watching the film last month after randomly encountering it on Amazon Prime, felt a click of recognition. She hit pause and Googled: Indeed, the lobby was that of The Durham Hotel.
As it turns out, Everything & the Universe—in which a man and a woman meet en route to the same wedding and realize they’re both in love with the bride—was filmed largely in Durham. It’s also explicitly set here, as opposed to representing an anonymous Southern city: Characters argue over fries at the Federal, shop for suit jackets at Dolly’s, and swivel in salon chairs at Moshi Moshi, among gathering at nearly a dozen other local spots…