Paris Is Burning sizzles again at the Sundance film festival

The Sundance film festival is usually about finding the next big thing in independent cinema, but each year the festival hosts a screening of one of the key works previously shown at the now 30-year-old festival. This year, Jennie Livingston unveiled a newly-restored digital print of celebrated documentary Paris Is Burning, 25 years after it premiered and 24 years after it won the grand jury prize at Sundance.

Paris Is Burning is getting attention because of its silver anniversary and also because it has become a cult for new generations of gay men, who have appropriated the slang of the black drag queens in it. “RuPaul has a whole show based on it,” Livingston says, referring to RuPaul’s Drag Race, a popular reality TV drag competition whose patois is heavily influenced by Paris Is Burning.

The original film was something of a revelation. Livingston spent seven years in late 1980s New York going to balls – social events held by the gay black community where contestants competed in different modelling and dancing events. These balls were also the birthplace of vogueing, the style of dance Madonna made famous shortly before Miramax released Paris Is Burning in 1991, when it became an arthouse hit.

“Back then, nobody wanted it. It was impossible to raise the money,” Livingston says. “Who knew it would catch on with white gay audiences; with audiences of colour that weren’t gay; the members of the ball community that got to see themselves represented; and now a whole new generation?”

Currently transgender characters and actors are having a moment in popular culture. Sundance this year features Tangerine, a movie about black trans prostitutes, and black trans actor and Orange Is the New Black star Laverne Cox co-stars in Grandma with Lily Tomlin. Livingston says the work that she did with Paris Is Burning is directly responsible: “Gary Lennon is one of the producers of Orange Is the New Black and he said when they were looking for Laverne Cox, they all watched Paris Is Burning. So there is a direct link. Would the character in Orange Is the New Black be like that if there wasn’t Paris Is Burning? I don’t know. Is it what people go to to understand black trans women? Often it is.”

Livingston says that she doesn’t keep up with what is happening in the ball world these days and doesn’t want to make another movie about ball culture (still vibrant in New York City). YouTube is chock full of videos of white teens vogueing in France and Japanese girls teaching others. Willi Ninja, one of the innovators of vogueing, says in the film that he wants to bring the dance style to Paris and to Japan; he finally did, but through Livingston’s film.

These days, with Paris Is Burning available on Netflix, it’s little wonder the film has been seen everywhere. “Someone my age would have had to go to the nearby town, to the cinema where it ran for two weeks,” Livingston says. “Now we have Netflix, Amazon and stealing it.”

Thankfully there is also a new digital print of the film, restored to its original 16mm ratio after it had been blown up for release on wide screens by Miramax. Livingston thinks the restoration is important. “That’s what the [director of photography] saw and that is what you saw in the ballroom,” she says.

The new print was a collaboration between Livingston, the Sundance Institute, the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project, and UCLA Film & Television Archive, which will now store Livingston’s original film. The director had beenconcerned about the safety of the negatives since the New Jersey facility in which they were stored suffered a flood.

As for the first screening of the new print at Sundance, Livingston says she had mixed emotions, mostly because so many of the subjects in the film have since died – of Aids and other causes. “I was from the bottom of my heart honoured,” she says. “I dedicated the screening to the guys I was rooming with [when I filmed the movie] who didn’t make it and the people in the movie who didn’t make it, and I felt sad … And I’m so proud and so honoured and I can’t believe I made a film that matters so much to people.” Now the film’s legacy is preserved, so it can inspire yet another generation.