IN PRODUCTION

"Marriage Equality: Byron Rushing And The Fight For Fairness" is a documentary that connects the Black Civil Rights movement with the Lesbian and Gay Marriage Equality movement. MARRIAGE EQUALITY, a project of award-winning filmmaker, Thomas Allen Harris, was commissioned by Tribeca Film Festival's All Access Program in collaboration with the Nelson Mandela Foundation. The film will premiere as part of a international celebration of Nelson Mandela. The project is seeking funds to match the support provided by Tribeca and Human Rights Campaign. An additional $10,000 is needed to complete post-production.

The project is a fifteen-minute documentary that interweaves archival footage, photographic archives and contemporary interviews to illuminate events surrounding the pivotal Massachusetts state constitutional convention on same sex marriage which gave new momentum to the national gay marriage movement as a civil rights issue. At the center of our story is Massachusetts Representative Byron Rushing, a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement who took the campaign for same sex marriage into African American communities, confronting the hostility of many religious leaders and defining the right to same sex marriage as a civil rights issue on par with the campaigns of the 1960s. An unlikely Gay Rights hero in some respects, Rushing, a heterosexual man of strong faith, has spent a lifetime championing the causes of the underserved, overlooked and oppressed.

In addition, MARRIAGE EQUALITY is partnering with the National Black Justice Coalition and Human Rights Campaign to create a nationwide outreach campaign that will launch with the film's premiere and include events and screenings in Black communities in Washington DC, Maryland, California and New York and will speak to both Gay communities and African American communities about this basic civil right.

Directed by Thomas Allen Harris

www.chimpanzeeproductions.com

http://throughalensdarkly.wordpress.com

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