Tying the Knot stills
	Sam in front of the vandalized entrance of his barn JPEG/ 300K Download
	Derrick and Wayne 's Beach Wedding JPEG/ 300K Download

A cool-button treatment of a hot-button issue.
—Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal

de Seve’s cogent pro-gay-marriage argument appeals equally to emotion and reason.
—Michael O’Sullivan, Washington Post

Compassionate.
—Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune

Informative and infuriating! The legal injustices suffered by the two partnerships might just break your heart.
—John Anderson, Newsday

Rousing and heartbreaking! This is the kind of film you watch with the hope that the other side is watching too.
—Kevin Allison, Out

de Seve’s cogent pro-gay-marriage argument appeals equally to emotion and reason. Centering as much around people as ideas, it follow s an Oklahoma farmer and a Florida policewoman both of whom have become embroiled in legal struggles to be recognized as spouses since their same-sex life partners died a few years ago.
In every way but on paper, as Tying the Knot makes clear, Sam and Earl and Mickie and Lois were married couples, and the legal roadblocks that have been set up to prevent them from enjoying the spousal benefits that straight widows and widowers would automatically get seem, to put it mildly, inhumane.
—Michael O’Sullivan, Washington Post

Of all the recent political advocacy documentaries, including FAHRENHEIT 9/11 and BUSH’S BRAIN, Tying the Knot may be the most coherent and the one most likely to change minds.
Director de Seve does an outstanding job of humanizing the issue.
Convincingly shows that much of the anti-gay argument is the same rhetoric used agains interracial marriage 40 years ago.
—Paul Sherman, Boston Herald

Tying the Knot succeeds by putting a poignant human face on the struggle for equal rights.
The usual suspects from the religious and political right pop up, but far more heartening are the shots of gay people in Toronto, Massachusetts, Amsterdam, and San Francisco celebrating marriages, no matter how fleeting their legality. One Dutch newlywed puts the issue in perspective. He says the Dutch base the degree of a country’s civilizations on how it treats its minorities. By that standard, how civilized is the United States?
—Carla Meyer, San Francisco Chronicle

The movie personalizes a ferocious political debate, never losing its frequently sad human face. De Seve takes us through both the emotional toll and thorny financial nightmare men and women face as gay widows and widowers without the legal protections of marriage.
Between the profiles, de Seve cleverly reconstructs the current battle over gay marriage using shots of rallies and protests, C-Span footage, and interviews with people such as gay conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan and E.J. Graff, author of “What is Marriage For?”
A sane, civil, humanist case for marriage for all, and you never fully forget the woebegone faces of people like Mickie and Sam.
—Wesley Morris, Boston Globe

Celebrates the heartfelt desire of most people – gay or straight – to unite completely with another human being.
—David Mermelstein, NY Sun

de Seve makes an effective, and often moving case, for tolerance.
—Glenn Whipp, LA Daily News

4 stars! Packed with information!
—David Sterritt, Christian Science Monitor

De Seve’s thought-provoking and timely documentary succeeds in putting the hot-button topic in human, and often heartbreaking terms.
—Robert Dominguez, NY Daily News

Tying the Knot puts a human face on a hot-button issue. Instead of focusing on political polemics, director Jim de Seve highlights telling, poignant personal stories that document lives hurt by laws prohibiting gay marriage.
—Stephen Farber, Movieline’s Hollywood Life

The most sobering, most moving account of the gay-marriage issue I’ve ever seen.
—Loren King, PlanetOut.com

Mickie and Sam's stories give Tying the Knot a powerful resonance.
—Sean Bugg, Metro Weekly

Gut-wrenching!
—Chris Phillips, Frontiers

Absorbing and persuasive!
—Ella Taylor, LA Weekly

Heartbreaking, frustrating, inspirational, and finally hopeful.
—Richard Knight, Jr, Windy City Times

de Seve's well thought out film is an excellent addition to this year's slate of political documentaries.
—Steve Warren, Reel Time

Tying the Knot packs a wallop! Informed and impassioned, de Seve translates polemic strategies into a focused rallying cry.
—Max Goldberg, SF Bay Guardian

Effective, sweet and moving! The personal narratives pack the punch. Mickie and Sam are Tying the Knot's greatest assets.
—Melissa Levine, SF Weekly

Extremely effective! These people’s stories deserve to be heard.
—Chris Barsanti, Filmcritic.com

"I think our society is great because people are able to live their lifestyles, you know, as they choose or as they're oriented."
—George W. Bush, President of the United States

"Freedom means freedom for everyone." "People ought to be able to be free — ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to."—Dick Cheney, Vice President of the United States

A lively, cogent docu...Jim de Seve gives a puckish, scholarly summation of the institution of marriage itself...De Seve captures the sense of a movement gathering momentum through times as state after state wrestles with the issues and the president seeks a last-ditch Constitutional Amendment to stem the tide.
—Ronnie Scheib, Variety

Lively, incisive and comprehensive! The film gets its punch by setting the movement’s progress and setbacks against accounts of two couples who lost their life partners and suffered dire economic consequences.
Amid the debate on both sides of the issues that de Seve diligently records, the droll remark of Kevin Bourassa, a Canadian gay activist, adds a common-sensical touch: “If you don’t like same-sex marriage, don’t have one.”
- Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

The stories put an affecting face on the just-ripped headlines.
—Ryan Godfrey, Philadelphia City Pages

The film brings the issue down to a persona, and often personally tragic, level.
Tying the Knot makes the case that it is not just societal recognition that same-sex partners lack without the official decree of a marriage – it is the legal rights that married couples share.
—Stephen Rae, Philadelphia Inquirer