Reel Affirmations: The Nation's LGBT Film Festival 2008

From luminaries such as Michael Moore to Al Gore. Niche film distributors like Women Make Movies and Third World Newsreel. YouTube.

Our lives, and the lives of far-away people and communities we'll never meet, are being documented at a greater rate than at any point in our history. In the rapidly evolving technology and media landscape, documentary film's use as a creative and powerful tool for change is growing.

Join us for a riveting presentation on documentary filmmaking's role in the movement for fairness and equality with nationally recognized media relations expert Cathy Renna; longtime LGBT organizer and advocate Jaime Grant of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute; expert on the radical right Kitty Kolbert of People for the American Way; and local documentary filmmakers Joe Wilson and Dean Hamer. Hamer and Wilson's work-in-progress, OUT IN THE SILENCE, chronicles an exhilarating journey through love, hate and understanding in Joe's small hometown as Oil City, PA's residents grapple with the firestorm of controversy over the publication of Wison and Hamer's wedding announcement in the local paper.

Wilson and Hamer's previous films have won numerous awards including winner of the PBS Independent Lens Online Shorts Festival and the Videomaker Magazine National Documentary Challenge. Their films have been screened in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Miami, Atlanta, Honolulu, London, Barcelona, Lisbon, Cape Town and Melbourne, and are being used as tools for education and social action by community groups, schools and universities around the county and around the world.