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Facebook’s First-Ever Ticketed Movie Premiere: 9/11 Documentary ‘The Outsider’ to Screen on Social Platform

Facebook will host its first paid film premiere later this month: “The Outsider,” a documentary about the challenges and controversies involved in building the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum in lower Manhattan, will screen exclusively on the platform on Aug. 19.

But for now, the one-off screening of “The Outsider” — to be available on Facebook for just 12 hours — doesn’t herald the social giant’s emergence as a major new player in the entertainment industry’s streaming wars.

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Abramorama, the indie film distributor that bought global distribution rights to the film, on Monday announced details of the Facebook screening, which Axios reported on today.

The exclusive Facebook premiere of “The Outsider” will be available to screen globally, available at this link, starting Aug. 19 at 8 p.m. ET until Aug. 20 at 8 a.m. ET. Tickets are $3.99 and include access to a panel discussion that will follow the film’s premiere.

Following the Facebook livestreaming premiere on Aug. 19, “The Outsider” will launch nationwide on Aug. 20 through Abramorama’s Watch Now @ Home Cinema Release. In early September, the film is slated to play in select theaters and on video-on-demand.

The film’s directors Pamela Yoder and Steven Rosenbaum, the team behind “7 Days In September” and “Overcome,” spent 20 years archiving and documenting the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. “The Outsider” promises never-before-seen footage collected over eight years, following the journey of the museum’s creative director Michael Shulan from the attacks on 9/11 to the building’s opening in 2014. During that time, the filmmakers were given unlimited access to the site, closed meetings and senior staff.

“The Outsider” also features interviews with the team that brought the museum to life, including its director Alice Greenwald, VP of design and construction Lou Mendes, the lead exhibit designer Tom Hennes, chief curator Jan Ramirez, VP of operations Amy Weiser and The Washington Post’s architecture critic Philip Kenniccot.

“It has been 20 years since 9/11, and Americans are increasingly thinking back, and want to understand the event that led up to the attack, and how we responded as a nation,” Abramorama CEO Richard Abramowitz and COO Karol Martesko-Fenster said in a statement when the company bought the rights to the film in June. “We think ‘The Outsider’s’ unparalleled access will take viewers inside the process of writing history. It will instantly become an essential document in helping to understand the historical, and historic, impact of that day.”

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