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Lynne Fernie is a Canadian filmmaker, best known as the co-director with Aerlyn Weissman of the award-winning 1992 documentary film Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives. Her other films have included Fiction and Other Truths: A Film about Jane Rule, School's Out! and Apples and Oranges.
Fernie was a founding member of numerous arts and LGBT organizations in Toronto, including the arts magazines Fireweed and Parallélogramme, the Lesbian Organization of Toronto and the Inside Out Film and Video Festival. She was also a frequent songwriting collaborator with the pop band Parachute Club, including on the band's most famous single, "Rise Up". She also collaborated with Lorraine Segato and Richard Underhill on "Bringing All the Voices Together", an unofficial "sequel song" to "Rise Up" which was written as a theme song for Jack Layton's campaign in the New Democratic Party leadership election, 2003.
She is currently a professor in the film studies department at York University, and is a programmer for the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival.
A portrait of Fernie, by artist Rafy, is held by the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives' National Portrait Collection, in honour of her role as a significant builder of LGBT culture and history in Canada. She is interviewed in Matthew Hays' Lambda Literary Award-winning book The View from Here: Conversations with Gay and Lesbian Filmmakers.
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