"Paris is Burning" director Jennie Livingston knows perfectly well what cinema can do.

"A film doesn't change the world," said Livingston. "A film can change consciousness. It can be educational."

Livingston's landmark 1990 documentary about the African American and Latinix drag ball scene in late-1980s New York City, "Paris is Burning" was released Tuesday in a new digitally-restored format on Blu-ray and DVD by the prestigious Criterion Collection.

Seen through modern eyes, "Paris is Burning" is remarkable in how it reveals the underground roots of so many terms and concepts that are prominent in our current lexicon.

Throwing shade, reading and gagging were all part of the vibrant, D.I.Y. world of pageantry and competition between voguers, drag queens and transgender women of Harlem 30 or so years ago — and Livingston's seven years of work on "Paris" captured the pioneering art and stories of people like Willi Ninja, Pepper LaBeija, Venus Xtravaganza and Dorian Corey for all time.

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The Texas-born, Los Angeles-raised Livingston said she and "Paris is Burning" editor Jonathan Oppenheim focused approximately 70 hours of film and 20 to 30 hours of audio interviews into the film's eventual dense-but-efficient 77 minutes.

“I was a young queer person," Livingston recounted, "but I certainly didn’t come from New York, I’m not African American, and I just felt like everything I saw at the balls had so much to say to all Americans who are interested in what our identities are and how we create our identities and how we kind of build this nation by figuring out who we are and figuring out how we fit into the sort of ideals and dreams and realities that are a part of our society.”

There's also a haunting quality to the film, added to the Library of Congress' National Film Registry in 2016. Livingston depicted ball culture as an aspirational one as outsiders served "realness," their own personal takes on mainstream glamour.

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In a post-"Paris is Burning" world, elements of that community have crossed over into the mainstream thanks to hit television series like "RuPaul's Drag Race" and "Pose," with Livingston serving as a consulting producer and director on the latter. Yet plenty of "Paris" subjects didn't live to see this moment.

“It feels very sad that particularly the women, many of the women, are not here, because the level of danger for trans women and the level of, for that generation, the impossibility of having a career that could be sustaining (or) having good medical care, particularly when you don’t have money," said Livingston.

The film confronts issues of violence, poverty, homophobia and transphobia that remain devastatingly relevant.

"You could talk about more glamour and people being cast in ‘Orange is the New Black’ and being cast in ‘Pose,’ people writing for ‘Pose,’ and those are remarkable opportunities that didn’t exist 30 years ago for sure for trans people or for black, gay men," Livingston said. "But those issues are the same, to this day, and that’s what’s worse.

"It’s really terrible that many people did not survive and both Dorian (Corey) and Willi (Ninja), those are the two people I was probably closest to, both died of AIDS, I was in their hospital room shortly before they both died. That is still painful, but it’s also painful to see that even though there’re more representation, and that representation is sort of spiritually or psychologically sustaining to people, there aren’t so many more resources."

That's where, all these years later, "Paris is Burning" can help.

Livingston's film has screened over the years to support efforts such as Fierce's work with LGBTQ youth in New York, the Black Lives Matter group at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute and the Manhattan-based Ali Forney Center's efforts on behalf of young, homeless LGBTQ people.

"I’ve been pleased whenever people use the film as part of their organizing, their activism, their consciousness-raising within their own community and also to reach out to other groups of people,” she said.

So say someone sits down to watch "RuPaul's Drag Race." The seasonal reading mini-challenge begins and RuPaul gives a shout-out to "Paris is Burning" upon declaring that the "library is now open." If this same person then watches Livingston's film and is moved to allyship, the director recommends they find organizations in their community that serve the population shown in the film, such as one working with homeless LGBTQ youth.

“For youth who are in the communities the film documents, a big problem is that people come out as gay or trans or lesbian or queer or genderqueer, whatever they come out as, and they’re ejected from their homes and they end up homeless at vulnerable ages," she said.

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There's another simple step Livingston said allies can take: "Just keep educating yourself, keep reading. There are so many books you can read now by queer and trans people. Explore the literature, keep educating yourself about what other people who aren’t like you go through and what those artists have to say — the movies, the poems, the novels, the non-fiction books, because that connects you.

"There’s a big thing, ‘You can’t know what it’s like to be someone else,’ and you can’t know what it’s like to walk around in someone else’s skin, but literature and film and other art forms are the next best thing and that’s why we do them.”

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"Paris is Burning" (1990), 76 minutes, is now available on Blu-ray and DVD from the Criterion Collection, www.criterion.com/films/29647-paris-is-burning.