Paris is Burning: 30 Years Later
Paris is Burning elevated drag and ballroom into the public consciousness and permanently impacted LGBT culture. However, the performers featured in the documentary didn't reap the rewards of their visibility.

Two women in a living room: smoking, playing cards, listening to the radio. As often in Dwoskin’s films, the use of masks, make-up and costumes allows the characters to playfully transform themselves. Shot in colour film, C-film exuberates swinging London energy. In the second part of the film, the women appear to be watching the rushes of the film on an editing table. ”We are making a movie” we hear them say. As Dwoskin points out, “C-film asks how much is acting acted”, an ongoing question in Dwoskin’s cinema. Produced by Alan Power, with Esther Anderson & Sally Geeson.
Paris is Burning elevated drag and ballroom into the public consciousness and permanently impacted LGBT culture. However, the performers featured in the documentary didn't reap the rewards of their visibility.
The quiet ache of guilt sitting at the dinner table, the silence after a truth is buried, and the way pain is passed down like a name.
“And I think to myself….what a wonderful world”. Louis Armstrong sang about this notion via his classic 1967 song, an ode to witnessing elements of our life that should be but some reminders of exactly what that concluding line of each verse indicates. Now we see our contemporary realities and, just being honest, it makes a sentiment like this seem SO overtly far away….perhaps even impossible….to accept or believe could be. It sounds harsh, but again, so much of what is occurring speaks not to beauty, but bedlam.
The most impressive aspect of this film is the honest and natural performances given by the on-screen duo.
While subverting the conventions of Golden Age cinema with the characteristics of a slasher, Pearl studies the delusions of grandeur inspired by the movies.