All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Ever since her 2006 documentary My Country, My Country critically addressed the US occupation in Iraq, director Laura Poitras has earned a reputation for her unflinching portrayals of national and global injustices, even at the risk of making powerful enemies (the ensuing government surveillance of her person was a propelling factor for her 2014 film Citizenfour, which earned her the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature Film).

In All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Poitras takes on Big Pharma, more specifically Purdue and the Sacklers: the family business behind Oxycontin, responsible for the ongoing opioid crisis in the United States. Her protagonist is photographer, artist and activist Nan Goldin, who founded the organisation PAIN – the acronym behind Prescription Addiction Intervention Now also aptly alluding to the vicious circle of the painkillers at the heart of the problem. Using her standing as a prominent figure in the arts, we accompany Goldin as she stages protests at museums (Met, MOMA, Guggenheim) to call awareness to the fact that the grants and donations they accept from the Sackler family are blood money, acquired from the deaths of half a million Americans.

Poitras conducts incredibly intimate interviews with Goldin that reveal much more than the reasons behind her engagement with the cause. It’s the second epidemic Goldin has to live through after having lost members of her chosen family to AIDS and feeling incredibly powerless at the administration’s inaction. Instead of cutting between the customary talking heads, Goldin’s voice is placed over images of her artwork, the format echoing the slideshows in which she presented The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and subsequent collections.

The feminist slogan “The personal is political” has always accompanied Goldin’s work, whose photographs documented her life and the people in it, and this film proves that her activism not only enhances but cements her artistic legacy.

Selina Sondermann

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is released in select cinemas on 27^th January 2023.

Watch the trailer for All the Beauty and the Bloodshed here: