Land Grant Films will host a free screening of "The Library That Dolly Built" at Kern's Food Hall in South Knoxville, celebrating Dolly Parton's legacy while raising awareness of the literacy program that has provided books to millions of children around the world.
The Knox County branch of Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, administered by the Knox County Public Library, will be on hand to help people sign up for the free program that sends books to children from the time they're born to the time they start school.
The event is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Sept 1 at 2201 Kerns Rising Way.
Land Grant Films is a student-led documentary program at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville led by Nick Geidner, who was inspired to document the story behind
the Imagination Library after seeing the joy it brought his own child.
The film was set to premiere in New York alongside a 330-movie theater rollout in April 2020, but that effort was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Geidner, who's also the director of The Media Center at UT, shifted and worked with the Imagination Library, Sony Pictures and Facebook to host an online premiere that was viewed by more than a million people and raised more than $250,000.
When families sign up for the Imagination Library, children through age 5 receive a free book in the mail each month with no strings attached. That's 60 books per child if they're signed up when they're born, and more than 3 million children are gifted a book each month. The library has gifted more than 330 million books since it began in 1995.
Geidner and his student crew conducted interviews and gathered archived material for the documentary, including from when Parton presented the nonprofit's 100 millionth book to the Library of Congress. The documentary represented the first feature-length project for Land Grant Films.
“From my standpoint, it was so fascinating because ... 80% of kids got Imagination Library. Everyone that I've talked to knew of it, but most people didn't know like (the specific details), like how the books get picked,” Geidner told Knox News in 2025. “A lot of people didn't know that it was outside of Tennessee.”
Parton, the Imagination Library and the documentary it inspired, Geidner said, are "proof that you can do big, ridiculous, audacious things that help your community."
The film is enjoying an extended shelf life, with Imagination Library affiliates across the country requesting screenings in theaters and at community events to educate people, raise money and grow awareness of the nonprofit's mission. Geidner said the documentary, which began as a passion project, has helped generate enough support to put an estimated 150,000 additional books in children's hands.
Keenan Thomas is the higher education reporter for Knox News. Email: keenan.thomas@knoxnews.com.
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This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Pair dinner, drinks with free Dolly documentary screening in Knoxville
