Venus Xtravaganza, a rising New York ballroom legend was killed aged 23 in December 1988, but she went on to become a global trans icon with her inedible appearance in Jennie Livingston’s groundbreaking 1991 film Paris Is Burning. Director Kimberly Reed’s feature documentary I’m Your Venus, which world premiered at the 2024 Tribeca Festival, picks up Venus’ story 35 years on. Reed introduces us to Venus’ biological brothers who she grew up with in New Jersey—John, Joe, and Louie Pellagatti—as they combine their efforts with members of Venus’ ballroom family—including the current Mother of House of Xtravaganza, Gisele Xtravaganza—as they seek to find answers about the circumstances of her still unsolved murder, attempt to secure a posthumous legal name change for Venus, and celebrate her legacy.
Reed’s acclaimed autobiographical documentary Prodigal Sons premiered at Telluride in 2008 and went on to win 14 international awards. She directed the “Transgender Pioneers” episode of the GLAAD Award-nominated four-part LGBTQ+ history series Equal on Max and executive produced the award-winning 2020 HBO documentary Transhood. She also produced, edited, and wrote Paul Goodman Changed My Life and was an early producer of The Death And Life of Marsha P. Johnson. Released ahead of the 2018 Midterms, Reed’s Dark Money was an award-winning selection at the Sundance Film Festival, named one of Vogue’s “66 Best Documentaries of All Time,” was shortlisted for an Academy Award, and won the duPont Columbia Prize for Broadcast Journalism.
Ahead of the world premiere of I’m Your Venus at Tribeca Festival, Kimberly Reed spoke exclusively with The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann about the impact that Paris Is Burning had on her when she first saw it, why she wanted to revisit Venus Xtravaganza’s story in this way, witnessing the Pellagatti and Xtravaganza families coming together, her use of archival material and footage of the memorial ball for O’Shae Sibley who was killed while voguing at a Brooklyn gas station in 2023.
James Kleinmann, The Queer Review: congratulations on the film. I found it powerful and profoundly moving. I was in tears the whole time watching it. It’s a really beautiful film.
Kimberly Reed: “Thank you very much. It’s a really intense story, it’s a complex story, and it was an honor to tell it. Sometimes I feel like the job of making a film is getting overwhelmed by all these emotions and then trying to process them and put them out there for others to experience what I went through. I’m so glad that that’s coming through.”
Taking you back, when did you first encounter Paris Is Burning and what impact did it have on you at that time?
“I was in film school in San Francisco and in the midst of my own transition. I had two sets of friends at the time. I was having a hard time coming out and, like a lot of trans folks, especially then, having a hard time imagining what that looked like. I was thinking, ‘Is this possible? Can you do this? I don’t have any examples of this. How do you find them?’ This was before the Internet, so I wasn’t one Instagram follow away from a good example of how one can be trans in the world. So watching Paris Is Burning had a really deep impact on me because I saw so many examples of that. What would it have been like if I had never seen that film? I think I would have come out a lot later, I think it would have been more difficult. Paris Is Burning became a really deep part of who I was and gave me the courage to come out and gave me the strength to resist some of the hate that comes your way as a trans person.”
“Seeing that film in 1991 impacted me very deeply, so something like 32 years later when I first heard about the opportunity to circle back on this, I was extremely interested in revisiting Venus’s story and her relationship to the present day Xtravaganzas and her relationship to her biological family. I was very interested in seeing what had transpired in between, but also, I’m always interested in stories that have a rich and replete and complicated microcosm, but that also tell all these stories about big issues that are going on in our society, in our culture today, and this film certainly resonates on both of those levels. So being able to tell the story of what happened back then—maybe what really happened back then, maybe not—but then also telling the story of what is happening today and what really hasn’t changed, unfortunately, since then, was an important story that I was motivated to tell in this present day.”
We hear Venus herself throughout the film through in archive footage from Paris Is Burning. What was your approach to using that and recontextualizing it in a way?
“Jennie Livingston was generous and kind enough to let us use that footage. It did involve some recontextualization and we tried to be very careful about ways in which it’s recontextualized. There are actually five different categories of archive from the film, whether it’s outtakes or excerpts, or edited outtakes, or edited excerpts, or the catch-all that says ‘from Paris Is Burning’ if it wasn’t edited or excerpted. Each documentary scene has to do about six different things at the same time. The main thing that we wanted to do with that footage was to introduce Venus as a character. There are a lot of people who are going to see this film who have not seen Paris Is Burning, so we are introducing them to Venus as Venus. Unfortunately this is the only footage that we have of her. There are a couple of photos and we’re using every single one that we could get our hands on.”
“We are also using portions of the footage to setup what ballroom culture was like in the late 80s, what a House is, what the structure is, what a Mother and Father of a House is, how it all works and what balls are. There is some exposition that needs to happen which we’re using that for, but mostly what we’re doing throughout the rest of the film is trying to bring Venus back, as a constant reminder, not unlike somebody who was taken from their family too young. Venus was tragically removed from the lives of the both the Pellagagttis and the Xtravaganzas way too soon and they didn’t have a chance to grieve, to let go properly. So we tried to use the archival footage as this constant presence, constant reminder, constantly informing you. You look at the front of house, and you see the Venus at the stove. Not unlike the way that somebody is reminded of their loved ones when they are taken away too soon. So the archive is working in that way, as we’re stepping in and stepping out of these two different time zones. There was a time travel mechanism that the archival footage provided for us.”
“One of the cuts I love, that was added recently, is from footage at a ball in the 80s of somebody voguing while they’re crouched down and walking and then you see that same movement reflected in a present day ballroom rehearsal with the Xtravaganzas. Filmmaking is a beautiful thing. You can create these associations across time, across more than 30 years in this case, where you understand the endurance and the longevity of the ballroom community and of our chosen families and the way that they supported Venus back then and are still doing the same job now.”
Can a camera being present allow people to open up and express themselves and think about things in a way that they perhaps haven’t before?
“I spent a fair amount of time on the other side of the camera making Prodigal Sons and I’m very glad as a filmmaker that I did, because that has led me to reduce the impact of the filmmaking apparatus that we all show up with that knocks people out of our normal behavior. But that said, there’s also something that’s magic and beautiful about the ways that cameras and focus and attention can encourage this kind of alchemy that otherwise wouldn’t happen. People understand that the people on the other side of the lens are listening for something in a certain way and that focus elicits a response that has never come out before and that can be really helpful and restorative and encouraging. So I end up doing a bit of both. Trying to make the cameras go away, but also to use the energy that comes from that attention that gives people a chance to say stuff that they’ve wanted to say for a long time but just never quite had the opportunity. Training your attention on someone and showing interest and curiosity is a wonderful thing and with films, if you show up and listen like that people say beautiful things.”
The footage of the rally and memorial ball for O’Shea Sibley is really powerful. It’s such recent history, just last year. Why was that something you wanted to include in the film?
“Violence against trans folks and people in the ballroom community—especially people of color who are trans in the ballroom community—was going on in 1991 when Paris Is Burning came out, and it’s still going on. That happened because some kid was voguing at a gas station and got stabbed. So it was important to show that things are still happening.”
“Ballroom is in the public eye with shows like Legendary and Drag Race and there are different ways that ballroom culture is making its way into more popular culture. That’s great, let’s have more of it. But if you only watch those shows, ballroom can be interpreted as this highly polished, presentational entertainment, but that’s not where ballroom comes from. It comes from chosen family structures that fill the gap when biological families aren’t doing the job and it is also rooted in kids protecting other kids in the streets.”
“The first time in the film where we witness ballroom in the present day, where we witness voguing, where we witness dancing, where we witness fierce, unapologetic self-expression, is in that O’Shea Sibley scene. It was important to show that ballroom is rooted in the streets, is rooted in political activism like that. In that situation it was happening in the exact location where O’Shea Sibley got stabbed, where there was still blood on the sidewalk. So that’s why that scene is important.”
What was it like to see the two families come together, Venus’ biological family, the Pellagattis, and her ballroom family, the Xtravaganzas, and to capture that on on film?
“When I first heard about the film, it struck me as a story about these two families and I was hoping that that they would join to accomplish the things that they did. But you never quite know how stuff is going to come together. It was a really beautiful thing to see happen in a really organic way. It’s going to be really fun to let this film roll out because one of the things that’s going to happen is that all the Pellaggattis are going to finally see all the Xtravaganzas. They’re all texting each other. They’re all friends now. Those connections have been built, that’s off and running on its own. These families have reconciled.”
“I’m super honored and super pleased to have been able to witness that reconciliation and to tell the story of that happening over the last two years and to share it with others. That’s what our country needs right now. With all of the hate and division, that’s what our world needs right now. Despite lots of tragedy and turmoil Venus’s biological family and her ballroom family have reconciled in a way that gives me a lot of hope. I think it should give viewers a lot of hope that this is how we’re going to overcome such divisiveness, especially at a time where so much of that hate is directed precisely at trans folks.”
By James Kleinmann
I’m Your Venus, which world premiered at the Tribeca Festival 2024, debuts on Netflix on Monday, June 23rd, 2025.
