The Barometer Online

Issue date: 2/2/09 Section: News

Media Credit: Alex Nguyen Joann Stutzman, a breast cancer health educator at the Corvallis Physicians & Surgeons Clinic, speaks to LUNAFEST attendees about identifying early signs of breast cancer.

Women and a few men from all over the Willamette Valley met in OSU's LaSells Stewart Center Saturday to support The Breast Cancer Fund and the Women's Coalition of Cancer by attending LUNAFEST Corvallis, a national touring festival of 100 minutes of films "by, for and about women."

"LUNAFEST was created eight years ago to explore the mind, body and spirit of women by showing unique films by independent female filmmakers," said the event's coordinator, Linda Lovett, to a crowd of roughly 400. "LUNAFEST is about joining the fight against women's cancer."

The traveling film festival is produced by LUNA, a company responsible for the whole nutrition bar for women based out of San Francisco. According to Lovett, LUNA requires that 15 percent of proceeds from the ticket sales, ranging between 10 and 12 dollars, benefit The Breast Cancer Fund, which studies environmental causes of breast cancer. The remaining 85 percent of proceeds go to a women's cancer non-profit organization as determined by the host.

In the film festival's fifth year running in Corvallis, the beneficiary selected was the Women's Cancer Coalition, which provides early detection screening of breast and cervical cancer and education and outreach programs to women regardless of income.

According to facts presented on a flier for the event, 47 women are diagnosed with breast cancer and 10 die from the disease in Oregon each week. For reasons still unknown, Oregon has the highest breast cancer rate in the country.

"I'm a breast cancer patient," said Mary Holzapfel of Tangent about her reason for attending the event.

Among several booths set up by local event sponsors throughout the reception area, she enjoyed the table with an artificial breast created to help women feel for lumps. Holzapfel's tumor was so small, the doctor's couldn't even feel it, she said.

A mammogram detected her lump last October. She's been receiving radiation treatments from the Cancer Center at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Corvallis, and she's happy to say she only has four treatments left.

Continued...

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