UNC-TV, PBS AND THE NATIONAL PARKS CONSERVATION ASSOCIATION
CELEBRATE KEN BURNS’S NEW FILM THE NATIONAL PARKS: AMERICA’S BEST IDEA
WITH A SPECIAL EVENING OF FILM AND MUSIC

The National Parks Celebration From Central Park includes clips from Burns’ upcoming PBS film and musical performances from Eric Benet, Gavin DeGraw, Jose Feliciano, Carole King, Alison Krauss and Union Station featuring Jerry Douglas & Peter Yarrow

UNC-TV will host a special screening of CelebrationFrom Central Park, Wednesday, September 23, at 8 PM, as part of a nationwide celebration of America’s national parks and the upcoming PBS film, THE NATIONAL PARKS: AMERICA’S BEST IDEA.  

The event will be held at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in downtown Raleigh, and is open to the public. Ticket information is available at: www.unctv.org/celebration.

“We are thrilled to offer our community the opportunity to join the people in Central Park in celebrating some of America’s greatest national treasure,” said UNC-TV Director and General Manager, Tom Howe. “With its depiction of the efforts to create and maintain our national parks, Ken Burns’s film represents the community spirit and civic engagement that UNC-TV continues today.”

Along with clips from THE NATIONAL PARKS: AMERICA’S BEST IDEA, which premieres September 27, at 8 PM, on UNC-TV, Eric Benet, Gavin DeGraw, Jose Feliciano, Carole King, Alison Krauss and Union Station featuring Jerry Douglas and Peter Yarrow grace the stage in performances honoring our national parks system. The event also features commentary and special remarks by Burns, series co-producer and writer Dayton Duncan, actor and series narrator Peter Coyote, park rangers Shelton Johnson and Gerard Baker, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, Department of Interior secretary Ken Salazar, PBS president Paula Kerger and other dignitaries.

For more information on the screening event, visit UNC-TV ‘s website at: www.unctv.org.

UNC-TV’s broadcast of THE NATIONAL PARKS: AMERICA’S BEST IDEA is made possible in part by the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation, Friends of the Great Smokey Mountain National Park, Mast General Store, Mission Health System and UNC-TV’s members.

About Ken Burns and THE NATIONAL PARKS: AMERICA’S BEST IDEA:

The 12-hour, six-part documentary series, directed by Burns and co-produced with his longtime colleague Dayton Duncan, who also wrote the script, is the story of an idea as uniquely American as the Declaration of Independence and just as radical: that the most special places in the nation should be preserved, not for royalty or the rich, but for everyone. As such, it follows in the tradition of Burns’s exploration of other American inventions, such as baseball and jazz. Filmed over the course of more than six years in some of nature’s most spectacular locales — from Acadia to Yosemite, Yellowstone to the Grand Canyon, the Everglades of Florida to the Gates of the Arctic in Alaska — the documentary is nonetheless a story of people from every conceivable background: rich and poor; famous and unknown; soldiers and scientists; natives and newcomers; idealists, artists and entrepreneurs; people who were willing to devote themselves to saving some precious portion of the land they loved and in doing so, reminded their fellow citizens of the full meaning of democracy.

THE NATIONAL PARKS: AMERICA’S BEST IDEA is a production of Florentine Films and WETA Washington, DC. Director/producer: Ken Burns. Producer/writer: Dayton Duncan. Co-producers: Craig Mellish, Julie Dunfey and David McMahon. Supervising editor: Paul Barnes. Episode editors: Paul Barnes, Erik Ewers and Craig Mellish. Cinematography: Buddy Squires, with Allen Moore, Lincoln Else and Ken Burns. Narrator: Peter Coyote.

For more information about this show and other programming on UNC-TV’s family of stations, visit www.unctv.org. A unique partnership of public investment and private support makes UNC-TV’s programming possible. As North Carolina’s only statewide television network, UNC-TV remains committed to producing and broadcasting programs for and about North Carolina, making it the state’s most important source of information about North Carolina.