Documentary film about 1950s-era segregation in Tennessee to be screened at Nashville Film Festival

NASHVILLE, TN – April 3, 2007 – Nashville Public Television has chosen THE CLINTON 12, a documentary film by director Keith McDaniel that recounts the struggle for racial integration at Tennessee’s Clinton High School in the late 1950s, as the inaugural recipient of its NPT Human Spirit Award.

The NPT Human Spirit Award, to be presented each year to a Nashville Film Festival selection, acknowledges a work that best explores and captures the human spirit. The film must illuminate in a high artistic manner the important characteristics of what it means to be human: generosity, kindness, mercy, compassion, fortitude and honor.

"THE CLINTON 12 was chosen from among the many films showing at this year's festival," wrote Beth Curley, Nashville Public Television President and CEO, in her congratulatory letter to Oak Ridge, TN-resident McDaniel, "for its ability to bring compassionate historical perspective to a time in one Tennessee community when the entire nation was grappling with desegregation and the importance of civil rights. The Clinton 12 is a meticulously crafted labor of love, and one well-told story."

THE CLINTON 12 focuses on the lives of the twelve black students who on August 27, 1956 entered Clinton High School, in Clinton Tennessee, for the first time.

Curley will present the NPT Human Sprit Award to McDaniel at the Wednesday, April 25 2007 Nashville Film Festival screening of THE CLINTON 12 at 7:30pm at the Regal Green Hills Cinema. Several of the students known as the “Clinton 12” will also be in attendance. The film will also be screened on Thursday, April 26 at 2:15pm.

As part of the NPT Human Spirit Award, Nashville Public Television will also broadcast the film, according to Curley, “so that others may participate in the profound dialogue it creates and celebrate the generous role that great film-making plays in our lives.”

The Nashville Film Festival, which features over 240 films from 40 countries, takes place April 19-26, 2007 at the Regal Green Hills Cinema.

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NASHVILLE PUBLIC TELEVISION is available free and over the air to nearly 2.2 million people throughout the Middle Tennessee and southern Kentucky viewing area, and is watched by more than 600,000 households every week. The mission of NPT is to provide, through the power of traditional television and interactive telecommunications, high quality educational, cultural and civic experiences that address issues and concerns of the people of the Nashville region, and which thereby help improve the lives of those we serve.

Nashville Film Festival is a non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation and receives funding from Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, H. Franklin Brooks Philanthropic Fund, William N. Rollins Fund for the Arts of The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee, The Frist Foundation, The Memorial Foundation, Nashville Metro Arts Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, Ragsdale Family Foundation, Target Stores, Tennessee Arts Commission, The Cal Turner Family Foundation, and its generous patrons and sponsors.