The Coronado Island Film Festival is proud to announce the 2024 season of the Coronado Student Classic Film Program. The 2024 series begins on February 11, 2024 with a 1 pm screening of the 1943 Warner Brothers Classic, Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in the Coronado Library’s Winn Room. Dubbed by Life Magazine as “The Most Beloved Movie of All Time,” Casablanca provides the foundation from which the 2024 series will begin screening a rich series of Film Classics from a diverse mix of Hollywood Genres.
* Note: This initial series screening of Casablanca is open to the general public, regardless of age. Subsequent screenings will require adults to be accompanied by a young person, 18 years of age or younger.
Why would young people want to screen classic films and learn more about
them? Why would parents, grandparents or friends who are classic film lovers want to invite young people and bring them to a screening?
Developing an appreciation for the artistic excellence of classic films is an acquired taste. The Student Classic Film Series is a cultural literacy program intended to encourage young people to acquire that taste. Viewing and discussing Classic films cultivates an understanding of both how memorable film narratives are created and the systematic discipline of “classic” screenwriting. The films in the student series are directed by the acknowledged masters of the craft during Hollywood’s Golden Age. All are examples of peak execution of cinematic art. Hollywood’s studio system brought these stories to life by placing them in hands of a small cadre of brilliant filmmakers, whom they equipped with the remarkable moving-making resources available in Hollywood’s Dream Factories.
Our second February 2024 feature is a Black History Month selection, Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1950 landmark film, No Way Out, which was the feature film debut of Sidney Poitier in a leading role. Poitier delivers an astonishing performance in a groundbreaking story that confronts the horror of obsessive race hatred. March will feature two classic Westerns, John Ford’s 1952 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, with John Wayne and James Stewart and Fred Zinnemann’s 1950 classic, High Noon, with Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly. April is Romantic Comedy Month, screening Frank Capra’s 1934 “Clean Sweep” Oscar winning comedy masterpiece, It Happened One Night with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert followed by George Cukor’s 1940 urbanely witty The Philadelphia Story, featuring Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart. In May, for the first time, the series will explore a distinctive American art form, the movie musical, beginning on May 5th with a film many critics consider the greatest Hollywood movie musical ever made, Singin’ in the Rain. The series concludes on May 19th with the exuberant and visually stunning 1955 film adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway hit, Oklahoma!
This program began in 2022 with seed-grant funding provided by the City of Coronado Community Grant.
