On the same evening as the NYC premiere of Tin Man I was presented with the Big Apple Film Festival Golden Apple Award for honorary achievement.
'The Golden Apple Award is presented each year to an outstanding member of the New York City film community. As a New York City resident, Mr. Cumming has played an influential role in the growth of independent filmmaking in the Big Apple, throughout the nation and around the world'
The Santa Fe Film Festival gave me their Maverick Award for career achievement and, well, for being a maverick. They screened both Suffering Man's Charity and The Anniversary Party. Also I gave an award to Carol Littleton and John Bailey, who were the editor and director of photography respectively of The Anniversary Party.
The picture shows me hanging out backstage at the awards ceremony with Alan Arkin.
In October I went to LA to receive for Lambda Liberty Award for my 'distinguished career and as an LGBT activist and champion for civil marriage equality'.
Lambda is a really great organisation that helps the LGBT community with legal matters as well as campaigning for changes to the law to give us equality.
Ghost Writer, or Suffering Man's Charity as it was called in those days was playing at SHOUT, the gay and lesbian film festival in Birmingham, Alabama and they very kindly gave me their inaugural Beacon Award, for increasing the visibility of LGBT characters and issues in popular media.
These awards are given by Scottish newspaper, The Herald, and I got mine both for my performance as Dionysus in the National Theatre of Scotland's production of The Bacchae at the 2007 Edinburgh International Festival, but also my contribution to festivals pasts, including the years I performed there as part of the cabaret duo Victor and Barry.
All the Bacchae girls came along to cheer me on and my Mum came down to Edinburgh too.
The Barcelona Gay and Lesbian Film Festival screened Suffering Man's Charity (now known as Ghost Writer) and gave me a tribute award for my body of work.
At the 2007 Film independent Spirit Awards, I, along with my fellow producers Ali Selim and Jim Bigham, received the Best First Feature award for Sweet Land.
We were presented with the award by America Ferrera and Zach Braff. Winning this award was a complete surprise and incredibly satisfying because this movie was a huge labour of love for all of us. It confounded all expectations in the way it was distributed and how well it did at the box office. It really was a great feeling to win for a movie that I believed in so much.
I attended the Phoenix Film Festival with Dori Berinstein, the director of Show Business: the Road to Broadway, in which I appear and co-produce. I also of course attended because they gave me the Copper Wing Tribute Award for my contirbution to Independent Cinema!
Past winners include John Waters, John Landis, Peter Fonda, Kevin Bacon, Robert Wagner and Laurence Fishburne.
