Charlottesville, VA – March 22, 2018 –

Virginia Film Festival to Host Katie Couric for Advance Screenings of Her New National Geographic Series ‘America Inside Out with Katie Couric’

The Virginia Film Festival will host award-winning journalist and UVA alumna Katie Couric on April 4 for an episode screening and discussion of her new National Geographic television series, America Inside Out with Katie Couric. The series premieres on National Geographic on Wednesday, April 11 at 10/9c.

The Virginia Film Festival is a program of the University of Virginia, with support from the Office of the Provost and Vice Provost for the Arts.

The episode to be screened is titled Re-Righting History and centers around the highly controversial and sometimes violent battle over removing Confederate monuments and renaming buildings, schools and roads named after Confederate generals. The episode includes Couric’s first-hand experiences of the events of August 11 and 12 in Charlottesville. Both screenings will be followed by a panel discussion where Couric and moderator Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and Professor of Politics, will be joined by members of the UVA and Charlottesville communities featured in the episode. Panelists will include Charlottesville High School students Zyahna Bryant, who wrote the original petition to have the Robert E. Lee statue removed from the park; Don Gathers, local activist and Chair of the Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Monuments and Memorials for the City of Charlottesville; Seth Wispelwey, United Church of Christ minister and one of the leaders of Congregate Cville; Gary Gallagher, Director for John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History at UVA and Professor in the History of the American Civil War (Paramount event only); and John Mason, Associate Professor in the Corcoran Department of History at UVA and Vice Chair of the Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Monuments and Memorials for the City of Charlottesville.

This first screening and discussion will be held at 3:00 PM at Culbreth Theatre and is open to UVA students, faculty, and staff. A public screening will follow at 7:00 PM in The Paramount Theater.

Tickets for both events are free and will be available starting at noon on Friday, March 23. There will be a limit of two tickets per person for each event.

Tickets for the 3:00 PM Culbreth Theatre screening will be distributed in person through the UVA Arts Box Office and are available only to the UVA community. UVA students, faculty, and staff must show a valid UVA ID at the Arts Box Office, located in the Drama Building at 109 Culbreth Road.

Tickets for the 7:00 PM Paramount Theater event can be reserved online at www.theparamount.net, by calling 434-979-1333, or in person at The Paramount Theater Box Office on the Downtown Mall at 215 East Main Street.

America Inside Out with Katie Couric is a six-part documentary series that follows Couric as she travels the country to talk with people bearing witness to the most complicated and consequential questions in American culture today. The series premieres Wednesday, April 11, 2018 and will air globally on National Geographic.

Inspired by her own journey making National Geographic’s critically acclaimed documentary Gender Revolution (2017), Couric travels to dozens of cities across North America — from Freemont, Nebraska, to Montgomery, Alabama, to talk with hundreds of people to get an inside look at pressing social issues, including gender inequality, Muslims in America, political correctness, white working-class anxiety, the battle over Confederate monuments and statues, and how technology is affecting our humanity.

“As a nation, we are in the midst of unsettling, often head-spinning change — how we live, how we communicate, how we see the past, the future and each other,” says Couric. “I wanted to explore some of the thorniest, most divisive issues facing the country, and give people the tools to have a conversation, not just an opinion. In the instantaneous, 24/7 news cycle, people seem to want affirmation, not information. That makes it all the more important to step out of our comfort zones and be open to different perspectives. I want to revive the lost art of listening, because when we understand each other, it can help us reclaim our empathy and humanity, and forge a path forward.”

For the episode featured in these preview screenings, Couric travels from Charlottesville to Montgomery to New Orleans, the front lines in the highly controversial and sometimes violent battle over removing Confederate monuments and renaming buildings, schools, and roads named after Confederate generals. Couric meets with people on all sides of this divisive issue: from Oscar-winning actress Julianne Moore, who is helping lead the fight to change the name of her former high school, to Sons of Confederate Veterans and white nationalists. This is a very personal journey for Couric, who attended the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and who, while filming this episode, found herself in the middle of the alt-right protest that rocked the nation. Couric sifts through all the emotions and experiences that inform the debate, as she talks with scholars, celebrities, and Americans of all races about the complicated question of how we approach the history — and the future — of race in this country.

The Virginia Film Festival will celebrate its 31st year this November 1-4, 2018. For more information on the VFF visit www.virginiafilmfestival.org.