Paris Is Burning (1991) on Netflix

R19911h 18mDocumentary History

Rival houses compete at New York City drag balls, where contestants walk categories and are judged on their clothing and realness. Pepper LaBeija, Dorian Corey and Willi Ninja are interviewed.

Netflix4.5/5
IMDb8.2/1021,692 votes
Rotten Tomatoes98%

Trailer

Plot summary

The documentary moves between ballroom competitions and interviews with the people who take part in them. Contestants walk in categories, and judges weigh their dancing, the look of their clothing and their realness, the ability to pass as the archetype they portray. Houses act as chosen families and performance teams, each led by a mother; a house that keeps winning earns legendary status. Members describe being rejected by their biological families over their gender expression and sexuality, and the poverty, racism, homophobia and AIDS they live with. Some walk in clothes they have stolen; some save for gender affirming surgery; some support themselves through sex work. A dance style called voguing, in which walkers pose and freeze as if for a magazine cover, grew out of these balls.

Cast

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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Paris Is Burning (1991)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

Producers planned to split about $55,000, a fifth of the film's sale price to Miramax, among 13 participants; several hired a lawyer in 1991 to sue for profits, but did not sue after their attorney found they had signed WNYC model releases. Paris Dupree had planned to sue for $40 million.
Once Paris Is Burning was finished, the producers still had to raise money to clear the music played in the ballrooms, and it cost almost as much to clear the music as it had to shoot and edit the entire film.
Despite its awards, Paris Is Burning did not get an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature that year, which generated accusations that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was homophobic and transphobic.
Paris Is Burning took seven years to complete because of production costs and trouble getting funding, and Jennie Livingston cut the finished film down to 78 minutes from more than 75 hours of footage shot on expensive 16mm film.
The film took National Endowment for the Arts money while the agency was under fire for funding Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano, so Jennie Livingston, fearing publicity could get the funding revoked, kept details of the project from everyone outside her small circle of producers and collaborators.
Jennie Livingston came across voguing while photographing in Washington Square Park, where two young men used the word, and she filmed her first ball, a mini-ball at the Gay Community Center on 13th Street, as an assignment for her NYU class.
More than a decade after its release, The New York Times reported in 2003 that Paris Is Burning remained a commonly used organizing tool for LGBT youth and a way for younger ball participants to meet their cultural ancestors.
Paris Is Burning is one of the main inspirations for the TV series Pose; its co-director Janet Mock said the film introduced her to the ballroom community and to positive representation of queer women of color like herself.