Name: BIG PICTURE: Paris Is Burning (1990)
Start: 2025-04-09T20:00:00-04:00
Location: Tampa Theatre

BIG PICTURE: "Dancing, Through Life"
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1h 18m / R / Music, Documentary
TRAILER:

VENUE: Historic Duncan Auditorium
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RuPaul, who for better or worse it’s impossible to talk about drag without mentioning, has said that “we’re all born naked and the rest is drag.” Which is to say: drag is performance, and like it or not, you are always on stage. Performing gender is just a part of it: you are conducting a lifelong headlining engagement of performing class and status and race and career and every other category of identity, comparing yourself against standards which you never consciously accepted and probably couldn’t even identify. Reality itself is a performance; the criteria on which your performance is judged is, literally, realness. As are the models here on film. Get told your whole life you’re not “real” men and women, and you cultivate a sharp, discerning (and caustically funny) eye for what the world thinks “real” is.
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.
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Discover this new series and the full Big Picture schedule at https://tampatheatre.org/movie-categories/big-picture-april-2025/
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This screening is held in the Historic Duncan Auditorium. This space utilizes open seating for this event, seat selection is not required.