The Film Foundation created The Story of Movies, an integrated interdisciplinary curriculum, in recognition of the importance of exposing future generations to classic cinema and teaching them about the cultural, artistic, and historical significance of film.

Film is a powerful language, one spoken globally. Understanding how film works – how images are framed, sequenced, paced and combined with sounds – is integral to literacy in the 21st century.

Although teachers frequently use films in the classroom, film as a language and as historical and cultural documents is not widely taught.

The Story of Movies project takes the current “read the book, watch the movie” approach one step further, teaching students how to interpret and understand the language of film and visual images. Increasingly, business, education, and information industries are relying on the language of moving images, sound design, and inference to communicate effectively with their target audiences. Young people are no strangers to cinema. Moving images have been a part of their childhood and movie-going is among adolescents’ most popular pastimes. Therefore it’s important that cinematic literacy be included when educating students on how to decode and encode visual communication.

• To learn more about The Film Foundation, click here.
• For more in-depth information about The Story of Movies teaching series, click here.
• Please note: The Story of Movies: To Kill a Mockingbird is no longer available to order. To download and print the collateral teaching materials that accompanied this program, please go to www.storyofmovies.org.

Thanks to the generous support of the IBM Corporation and Turner Classic Movies (TCM), the Story of Movies programs are being distributed free of charge to schools nationwide.