Bruce Cohen, Nina Jacobson and Bryan Singer to Co-Chair 2012 LEGACY AWARDS

OUTFEST, the world's leading organization dedicated to showcasing, protecting and nurturing LGBT film imagery and artistry, announced today that producers Bruce Cohen (Milk) and Nina Jacobson (The Hunger Games), and director Bryan Singer (Usual Suspects, X-Men) will co-chair the 8th annual Legacy Awards. This year's event will take place on Saturday, October 13th at the Orpheum Theatre in downtown Los Angeles.

The Legacy Awards serve as a fundraiser for the Outfest Legacy Project for LGBT Film Preservation, which is a collaboration between Outfest and the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and the only program in the world devoted to saving and preserving LGBT moving images.

The centerpiece screening at the 2012 awards will feature a special Sneak Preview screening of the Legacy Project's most challenging restoration to date. The silent film DIFFERENT FROM THE OTHERS (ANDERS ALS DIE ANDERN), made in 1919, is arguably the earliest surviving cinematic work made explicitly about LGBT people. Directed by Richard Oswald and co-written by famed psychologist Magnus Hirschfeld, it is believed to be the only film from a group of gay-friendly movies made during Germany's Weimar era that escaped systematic destruction by the Nazis.

Written as part of a campaign to oppose the passage of Paragraph 175, the German law outlawing homosexuality, DIFFERENT FROM THE OTHERS caused a major scandal upon release for allegedly glorifying homosexuality and endangering public order and security. The Legacy Project restoration uses a 40-minute fragment discovered in the Ukraine–– the only known film element to have survived World War II. English-language title cards and intertitles have been created and a new negative will be struck to preserve the restored film for the future.

"The restoration of DIFFERENT FROM THE OTHERS is without question our most ambitious and most important project to date," says Kirsten Schaffer, Executive Director of Outfest. "We have an extraordinary opportunity not only preserve history, but to make history in the process. We are immensely grateful to Nina, Bruce and Bryan who have been relentless supporters of our mission."

Outfest and the UCLA Film & Television Archive partnered in 2005 to create the Outfest Legacy Project for LGBT Film Preservation. The only program of its kind in the world, the Outfest Legacy Project is aimed at the growing crisis in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender moving image archiving. Many of the landmark LGBT films produced over the last 30 years are already in danger of fading away; their original exhibition prints are in tatters and their negatives are in woeful storage conditions, or even lost. Celebrating its seventh anniversary, the Outfest Legacy Project is proud to have collected over 20,000 moving picture images for the collection and restored 18 films.

Tickets go on sale on September 6th. To purchase and for further information, please visit www.outfest.org.

 

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