2025 is the 80th Anniversary of the end of WWII, the most consequential global conflict of arms in human history. To honor this historic anniversary, the 2025 CIFF (Coronado Island Film Festival) Student Classic Film Series will present a slate of Hollywood film classics made during and/or about WWII.
Screenings will be sequenced to follow the timeline of the war, creating a four-month cinematic history lesson. The series will be introduced to Coronado on February 16 at 1 pm in the Library’s Winn Room with an “open to the entire community” screening of William Wyler’s 1942 Best Picture Oscar winning “Mrs. Miniver,” starring Greer Garson who earned a Best Actress Oscar in the title role.
WWII-themed screenings will continue through May, concluding Memorial Day weekend with the quintessential “coming home” war drama, 1946’s Best Picture Oscar winner, “The Best Years of Our Lives.” The complete Student Classic Series schedule and reservations are available on the CIFF website under the “Year-Round” dropdown tab. All Student Classic screenings are free.
While we cannot recreate the art, music, and literature that once was, we can, through the magic of motion pictures, revisit the culture from which such stories arose by screening film classics created by the first-generation masters of movie-making during Hollywood’s Golden Age (mid-1930s to early 1960s). Classic films endure because they were made by a cadre of brilliant artists who were not far removed from families of farmers, miners, ironworkers, and saloon keepers, hardscrabble ordinary people who built our great nation.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, a great many prominent filmmakers and actors from Hollywood’s dream factories volunteered and served alongside ordinary American soldiers, sailors and airmen. All films in the 2025 Student Classic Series tell stories of ordinary people facing extraordinary challenges, before, during and after the war. They are stories of courage; stories of characters for whom “doing the right thing” was assumed to be a duty. Each of the films are recognized today as classics because they have proven to be profoundly moving, often while never consciously intending to be so when first released.
The moral imagination is what human beings employ to recognize truth, beauty and goodness. Healthy societies shape the moral imaginations of their young people. Absent such an effort, the character of young people will be formed by pop culture, television, streaming services and social media.
We intuitively understand this truth. The question is what can a healthy community provide to shape the formation of virtuous character in young men and women who will be the leaders of tomorrow? Virtues are passed from one generation to the next through stories; stories read to children; stories written in novels and staged in plays; stories dramatizing historic events; stories that inspire young minds to consider life’s meaning and purpose; stories that extoll the merits of what is best in our cultural heritage.
The Coronado community is invited to hear more details about this exciting slate of 2025 film classics on February 16 at 1 pm in the Library’s Winn Room in this“open to the entire community” screening of “Mrs. Miniver.”
The complete Student Classic Series schedule and reservations are available on the CIFF website under the “Year-Round” dropdown tab. All Student Classic screenings are free.
