Entering the second season, the CIFF Student Classic Film Series has a new location and time. The program will now screen in the Winn Room of the Coronado Public Library on Sundays at 1pm, and admission is now free to all students.
The Series is a cinematic cultural literacy program (how to watch, listen and understand) introducing middle school and high school students to the art of film as it first developed and was practiced by the masters of the film-making craft during the Golden Age of Hollywood. While cinephiles may argue, the Golden Age is generally recognized as studio produced, auteur director films made from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s. This era featured a unique mix of economic, cultural, and social conditions, aligned perfectly for making great movies by the score.
The best Golden Age films exemplify peak execution of the technical cinematic craft of storytelling, coupled with exceptional screenwriting by people who learned how to script memorable narrative story lines using a disciplined, tried and true, “Classic” movie-making model. The studio system brought such stories to life by placing them in hands of a small cadre of exceptional directors, to whom they gave access to their remarkable moving-making resources. Those “resources” included well-known “Classic” movie stars under studio contract; but, equally as important, a vast stable of talented, hard working character actors. These screen actors mastered the techniques of telling stories visually, in ways that still have exceptional power to capture the imagination. All truly memorable films of the Golden Age show virtue in action.
Open to Middle and High Schoolers; Parents/ Grandparents/ Guardians welcome! No adult may attend without a student.
The 2023 season will feature a spectacular Student Classic Film lineup, beginning on Sunday, February 26th at 1 pm with a Valentine’s month romantic comedy treat, The Ernst Lubitsch Classic, The Shop Around the Corner, and concluding, Memorial Day Weekend (May 28th), with William Wyler’s post-war masterpiece, The Best Years of Our Lives, winner of 10 Academy Awards in 1946.
The schedule will feature two screenings per month in March, April and May, featuring Hollywood legends including Cary Grant, Myrna Loy, Alan Ladd, Ronald Colman, Jane Wyman, James Stewart, Jean Arthur, Fredrick March and many more. For more information and reservations go to coronadofilmfest.com, select the “Year Round” drop-down menu and “Student Classic Program.”
* The program began in 2022 with seed-grant funding provided by the City of Coronado Community Grant.
