Big Picture: Paris Is Burning (1990)
- Presented By: Tampa Theatre
- Dates: April 9, 2025
- Time: 8:00 PM
- 711 N Franklin St, Tampa, FL 33602
- Price: $7-$10
Tampa Theatre
For the next subject of our new monthly Big Picture series, Tampa Theatre offers Dancing, Through Life: a selection of films that all center the experience of dance as a method of escape — escape from a difficult life, escape from an adversarial world, even transcendent escape from the mundane into ecstatic beauty.
Big Picture: Paris Is Burning (1990)
Paris is Burning is a film on fire, a livid and scintillating documentary about drag ball culture in Harlem in the mid-1980s. It follows people from a variety of different “houses” as they stage elaborate runway shows and compete in different categories of representation. It took seven years to make, cutting 75 hours of footage down to 78 minutes. And those seven years were right in the middle of the AIDS epidemic, which burned apocalyptically through the Black, Latino, and LGBTQ communities. Controversial from the moment production began, it is a complicated, breathtakingly human document of dance making families, giving purpose and expressing truth.