It’s not Cannes and it’s not Sundance, but for Washington’s gay and lesbian community, the Reel Affirmations film festival comes pretty close. The Reel Affirmations International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival has expanded in its 16th year and will be showcasing a more diverse selection of films than ever before from Oct. 12 through Oct. 21. Films will be shown at the Lincoln Theatre and the E Street Cinema.The festival will open with a viewing of Hedwig and the Angry Inch director John Cameron Mitchell’s new film, Shortbus.Described by Variety magazine as “unquestionably the most sexually graphic American narrative feature ever made outside the realm of the porn industry,” Shortbus is an ensemble piece. It features Sook-Yin Lee, Lindsay Beamish, Paul Dawson, Justin Bond and many others, as well as cameos from LGBT community staples such as Le Tigre’s JD Samson, Bitch of folk rock outfit Bitch and Animal and her partner, The L Word’s Daniela Sea.According to the Mary Riepma Ross Film Theater website, the title comes from the name of the “modern-day weekly salon in the Parisian Gertrude Stein tradition,” in which the lives of the desperate characters are thrown together to answer the question: “Am I to be alone or am I not?”While Shortbus is saturated with all walks of sexual behavior, to say the film is about sex is to take a shallow view of the work. Like Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001, Shortbus is about breaking taboos and celebrating the beauty and variety of life and love. It’s also about the quest to end loneliness in a world that offers no favors.”In the end, the sex is just sex, and it’s real sex, but I think the movie just goes so much deeper, and in the end [Shortbus is] reassuring and very touching,” Reel Affirmations Programs Director Joe Bilancio says. “We tend not to shy away from controversy.”Mitchell worked on Shortbus for over two years – from the initial auditions through the actual filmmaking. With a largely amateur cast, much of the film was improvised, but none of the physical sex is simulated. In the film’s uncensored trailer, Mitchell remarks, “It’s everything you need to get through the next two years of George Bush.”A group of university students affiliated with the Pride Alliance attended a special college screening of Shortbus at the AMC Loews Theater in Georgetown.”The movie is fantastic,” said Louis Choporis, director of finance for the UMD Pride Alliance. “It is like sexuality and gender studies illustrated in a movie.”Sophomore Alexandra Douglas-Barrera, who also attended the screening, felt differently.”There was dramatic under-representation of other queer groups in the movie,” Douglas-Barrera says. “It was very gay male-centric.”But when Bilancio was asked what films he thought would be best for university students to attend, the director recommended the free film showings at the Lincoln Theatre on Thursday and Friday, and C.R.A.Z.Y., which is playing at the Lincoln Theater at 7 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 14. He also suggested Yaji and Kita: The Midnight Pilgrims, which is playing at the Lincoln Theatre on Friday, Oct. 20.”We love to see younger people attend,” Bilancio says.Contact reporter Jenna Brager at diversions@dbk.umd.edu.