Art always has a message, whether intentional or not. It was one of the most enlightening bits of critique I got in a creative writing class in college. I was asked once if there was symbolism to something that had been a random roll of the dice choice of a random name that I felt sounded good with my mouth. Yet the name had significance to the reader. Film is the same way, every movie has a message they’re trying to impart to the viewer. Documentaries even more so. Given their subject matter, a documentary usually has a slant to it, is it supporting the person it’s about? Or is it lambasting them and showing them to be a contemptible person? Every documentary is making a point.
Last year I attended the 2024 Tribeca Festival, mainly because I just wanted to attend *a* film festival and this one is practically in my backyard, so it made the most logical sense. I didn’t have a sense of any of the movies I was going to see beforehand, but I looked through the slate when it was released and found one particular film that I felt desperate to have the opportunity to see. I’m a wannabe filmmaker, screenwriting major, so I took several film studies classes in college, but that meant that sometimes I saw the same movie multiple times. Usually it was a film I didn’t particularly enjoy, like the time, through some ironic twist of fate, I had to watch the same French New Wave film, Contempt (Godard, 1963), twice within three days, once in a Friday class and then in my next Monday class. But of all the movies I had to sit through repeatedly, there was none more enjoyable than Jennie Livingston’s 1990 classic, Paris is Burning.
I wasn’t a sheltered kid, but I wasn’t exposed to the greater LGBTQIA+ community much as a kid outside of my lesbian aunt and a gay couple my parents knew. My first exposure to a transgender character was a stray episode of Degrassi: The Next Generation that I watched in middle school. So, while Paris is Burning wasn’t my introduction to the concept, it was the first time that I knew any of the history involved and what it was like in New York City for those people involved in the drag and ballroom communities. It was an eye-opening experience to hear their stories in their own words, but the breakout star of the documentary was a young woman named Venus.
Venus Xtravanganza from Paris is Burning
And that’s not just me projecting because she was my favorite part, Venus Xtravaganza is the highlight of the documentary, not just because of her incredible screen presence, but heartbreakingly, because she did not live to see the release of the documentary. As described towards the end of the documentary, Venus Xtravaganza was brutally murdered in 1988 at the Fulton Hotel and her body went undiscovered for a few days before being found. The killer was never found, and the documentary features a small segment near the end with a reaction to her death from Angie Xtravaganza, Venus’ house mother. The documentary makes special note of her desire for gender-affirming surgery,
“I don’t feel like there’s anything mannish about me…I guess that's why I want my sex change, to make myself complete.”
She also mentions her family’s reaction to her gender identity:
“I used to do it behind my family’s back, just dressing up, till finally they caught on with it. And I didn’t want to embarrass them, so that’s when I moved away”.
But that’s not entirely true, the footage of Venus throughout the movie was filmed at her grandmother’s house, so she hadn’t completely left her biological family and at least her grandmother was accepting of her lifestyle enough to allow her to live there. Then that scene at the end when Angie describes how she found out, she mentions informing the Pellegatti family:
"I was the one that had to give all this information down to her family".
So for a while, I thought her family didn’t care or that she had been completely disowned by them for being transgender. That was where her story was left for three decades until two filmmakers rewatched the documentary and got curious. As it turns out, there was much more to her story. And now everyone knows the rest of the story, from I’m Your Venus (2024, Reed)
A chosen family is important, particularly in marginalized communities where one might be expelled from their biological family for a multitude of reasons, but it’s powerful when one’s birth family and chosen family can unite. And that’s exactly what happened in this documentary. Seeing the film at the Tribeca Festival, there are a lot of people you’ll see in the theater. There are serious film buffs, film journalists, directors, writers, and sometimes celebrities, but you also get tourists off the street who see a line and grab a rush ticket. So I wasn’t necessarily surprised by a group of older men who seemed incongruous, not to the general Tribeca vibe, but to the subject matter of the movie. However, I thought, “They’re here to see the Venus Xtravaganza documentary?” But the men, in the row in front of me, weren’t there to see the movie, they were in it, being Venus’ brothers, who were a major focus of the documentary.
In short, the documentary is about the Pellegatti family teaming up with the House of Xtravaganza to right some wrongs. The first being the unsolved murder and their attempts to get the case reopened and evidence reexamined, the second being to get her name officially changed on records so that her death certificate and headstone will no longer have her deadname displayed on it, and the final being to get her childhood home in New Jersey designated a historical landmark. As the film shows, her biological family, the Pellagatti family, knew about her transition, one of her brothers sharing an anecdote of the first time he found out, having seen her on a street corner while driving around the city, and how she bolted away when she recognized him. But they still loved her. They loved her, they mourned her death, and maybe it took a few decades to work through their feelings, but they came together with the Xtravaganzas to try to get some closure and do justice to her legacy.
I’m not going to summarize the entire movie, for multiple reasons, 1. That would be pretty lazy of me and 2. I saw the movie over a year ago and it has yet to be released onto any physical media or streaming platform. (Sidebar: This is common for films that debut at film festivals as distribution deals take a long time and a lot of work to set up. Thus far, only one of the movies I saw has been given a formal theatrical release and that one had a lot of star power in it and a producer had mentioned that they were negotiating a distribution deal at my screening, so it had already been in the works) Thus, given that I only saw it once over a year ago, and because human memory is incredibly fallible, I’d probably get a lot of the details wrong and I only have some scant notes that I wrote inside the theater. But I didn’t write much because I was entranced the entire time, and if I wasn’t in rapt attention I was wiping tears from my eyes. But I will tell you how I remember feeling.
Here are my unedited notes from watching the film, I apologize in advance for my chicken scratch handwriting and will include descriptions of what is said in them:
I’m Your Venus
Very pretentious 😛
Staff so far very nice
Crowds seem to emulate films, mostly AMC has nicer seats
Concessions avail, but I’ve been eating at home cause I don’t want to have to get up to pee
Censored dead name
Family
Forget life goes on
Family’s still out there
Bio fam is so Italian
Saw a B&N in BG (background)
Ave P + KH Protest
Lots of regret
Changed deadname included both names
Protected home as landmark
Gorgeous film
Does enormous justice to her legacy + Paris is Burning
Paris made it seem as if her family didn’t care but they did
So much love for her, they knew + loved her
Her family was in row in front of me
And they loved her so much
Honestly, if you can parse those notes, that’s what the review is. If you can’t, then this is the TL;DR:
If you've seen Paris is Burning, this is required viewing. Her family knew she was transgender and they still loved her and they miss her. A great showing of how Venus Xtravaganza's biological family and her ballroom family came together to honor her legacy. It left me sobbing.
I enjoyed how the film made time for both her families and their use of extended clips not originally seen in Paris is Burning, and I'm so glad that the filmmakers decided to make this film while her families were still around to participate in it. It’s not out yet outside the festival circuit and indie screenings, but if you have an opportunity to see a screening at a local cinema, then I highly suggest that you do. And most importantly, always ask questions of every film you see, because there's always an answer if you bother to search for it.