[2] Filmed in the mid-to-late 1980s, it chronicles the ball culture of New York City and the African-American, Latino, gay, and transgender communities involved in it.

[3] Critics consider the film to be an invaluable documentary of the end of the "Golden Age" of New York City drag balls, and a thoughtful exploration of race, class, gender, and sexuality in America.

[6] Filming through the mid-to-late 1980s, this documentary explores the elaborately-structured ball competitions in which contestants, adhering to a very specific "category" or theme, must "walk", much like a fashion model parades a runway.

The balls are viewed as sites for performance, fame, and exclusive celebrity status in the subculture of queer Black and Latino folks, who are rarely afforded the opportunity to exist in mainstream culture.

Contestants are judged on criteria including their dance talent, the aesthetic beauty of their clothing, and the "realness" of their drag - i.e., their ability to pass as a member of the stereotype, gender, or sex they are portraying.

For example, the category "banjee realness" comprises gay men portraying macho archetypes such as sailors, soldiers, and street hoodlums.

Most of the film alternates between footage of balls and interviews with prominent members of the scene, including Pepper LaBeija, Dorian Corey, Angie Xtravaganza, and Willi Ninja.

Jennie Livingston, who moved to New York after graduating from Yale to work in film, spent six years[7] making Paris Is Burning, and interviewed key figures in the ball world.

The film explains how words such as house, mother, shade, reading and legendary gain new meaning when used in novel ways to describe the gay and drag subculture.

According to Livingston, the documentary is a multi-leveled exploration of an African-American and Latino subculture that serves as a microcosm of fame, race, and wealth in the larger US culture.

[10] Through candid one-on-one interviews, the film offers insight into the lives and struggles of its subjects and the strength, pride, and humor they display to survive in a "rich, white world."

She conducted audio interviews with several ball participants: Venus and Danni Xtravaganza, Dorian Corey, Junior Labeija, Octavia St. Laurent and others.

In 2020, the Criterion Collection re-released Paris Is Burning with features including new interviews and conversations with cast members, scholars, etc.

The re-release also includes a 2005 audio commentary from Livingston, Freddie Pendavis, Willi Ninja, and film editor Jonathan Oppenheim.

The website's critical consensus reads, "Paris Is Burning dives into the '80s transgender subculture, with the understated camera allowing this world to flourish and the people to speak (and dance) for themselves.

Everything about Paris Is Burning signifies so blatantly and so promiscuously that our formulations – our neatly paired theses and antitheses – multiply faster than we can keep track of them.

[17] Writing for Z Magazine, feminist writer bell hooks[a] criticized the film for depicting the ritual of the balls as a spectacle to "pleasure" white spectators.

hooks criticizes the production and questions gay men performing drag, suggesting that it is inherently misogynistic and degrading towards women.

[19]Both hooks and Harper criticize the filmmaker, Jennie Livingston, who is Jewish, gender-nonconforming, and queer, for remaining visibly absent from the film.

Ethnographic films are typically made by western filmmakers aiming to document the lives and practices of people belonging to non-western cultures.

In 2003, the New York Times reported that more than a decade after its release, Paris Is Burning remains a commonly cited and frequently used organizing tool for LGBT youth; a way for scholars and students to examine issues of race, class, and gender; a way for younger ball participants to meet their cultural ancestors; and a portrait of several remarkable Americans, almost all of whom have died since the film's production.

About Paris Is Burning, Morris says "seeing [Livingston's] documentary as soon as possible means you can spend the rest of your life having its sense of humanity amuse, surprise, and devastate you, over and over."

[4] Responding to the financial dispute, Livingston has expressed that documentaries are works of nonfiction and journalism, and that it has never been standard practice to pay their subjects.