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 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)