Entertainment News
2006-08-30
Parting Glances and Word Is Out to be restored
UCLA and Outfest
have announced the first two feature films slated to be
restored as part of the Outfest Legacy Project for LG
UCLA and Outfest
have announced the first two feature films slated to be
restored as part of the Outfest Legacy Project for LGBT Film
Preservation: Parting Glances (1986), starring
Steve Buscemi, and the groundbreaking Word Is Out:
Stories of Some of Our Lives (1978). The UCLA Film
and Television Archive and Outfest, the Los Angeles
gay and lesbian film festival, partnered in 2005 to
create the program, the only one of its kind in the
world. The Legacy Project has already established the
world’s largest publicly accessible collection
of LGBT films.
While mainstream
films are both collected by nonprofit archives and cared
for by the commercial film industry itself, independent
films are largely overlooked. LGBT independent
films—including significant titles from the
1970s, 1980s, and 1990s—are in particular peril
because of a perceived lack of commercial value by the
industry or the filmmakers’ inability to
maintain their work themselves.
“What if
we were unable to share these life-altering images with
future generations?” asked Outfest executive
director Stephen Gutwillig. “These moving
images represent a profoundly important record of our
struggles and joys—a record of where we come
from as LGBT people. We cannot and must not be
complicit in the erasure of our lives and our
history.”
“Motion
pictures document individuals and society in all their
complexities,” said Robert Rosen, dean of the UCLA
School of Theater, Film, and Television.
“Future generations will be grateful to us for
safeguarding the past and will come to know us through the
films we are passing on through the Outfest Legacy
Project,” he added.
The Outfest
Legacy Project is supported by the David Bohnett Foundation,
the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, Roland Emmerich,
Jason Murakawa and Dean Hansell, and John and Michael
August. (The Advocate)
Click here to follow The Advocate on Twitter.
Page 1 of 1