Eleven years ago, writer/director John Hughes died of a heart attack on a Manhattan street corner. The man behind classic 80s teen films, like The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, had been called “the voice of a generation.” To our programming coordinator, Tim Anderson, he was more than that. “Hughes was the J.D. Salinger of my lifetime,” says Anderson, “a single man, who chronicled the painful transition of adolescence.” Hughes’s films are touchstone reminders of what it is like to be awkward and socially inept as we all have tried to navigate the labyrinthine hallways of High School, USA. We look forward to taking you on a journey through teenage truth – perhaps not everyone’s truth, but the truth of a bunch of kids (and a computer-generated female Frankenstein) from the fictional town of Shermer, Illinois.

They were five students with nothing in common, faced with spending a Saturday detention together in their high school library. At 7 a.m., they had nothing to say, but by 4 p.m. they had bared their souls to each other and become good friends. John Hughes, creator of the critically acclaimed Sixteen Candles, wrote, directed and produced this hilarious and often touching comedy starring Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy. To the outside world they were simply the Jock, the Brain, the Criminal, the Princess and the Kook, but to each other, they would always be The Breakfast Club.