Photographer Nan Goldin became addicted to the painkiller OxyContin after an operation in 2017. Since then, she has fought tirelessly against the Sackler family, accused of marketing the drug without warning of its addictive effects and fueling the crisis in opioids.
It is in his fight, but also in his life and his work, that the American documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras is interested in All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which won the Golden Lion at the most recent Venice Film Festival. Poitras won the Oscar for best documentary in 2015 for Citizenfourabout whistleblower Edward Snowden, who denounced digital espionage, especially from the United States.
Over the past two decades, some 500,000 deaths in the United States alone have been attributed to the overuse of opioid painkillers and overdoses of these drugs. Nan Goldin founded with other activists the organization PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), devoted to the prevention of overdoses.
The artist leads with his group, made up of opiate addicts and their relatives, a fight of David against the Goliath represented by the billionaire Sackler family. Its events take place in very symbolic places, that is to say in prestigious museums (the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the National Gallery in London, the Louvre in Paris, etc.) which are both financed by this family of patrons and which present works by Nan Goldin.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY NEON, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Nan Goldin in All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed deals not only with activism, but also with the journey of Nan Goldin, who has long photographed her friends from theunderground queer in Boston, then in the Bowery district of New York. Transvestites, poets, writers, filmmakers, but also fellows, prostitutes or junkies of the 1970s and 1980s, at a time when an AIDS diagnosis was equivalent to a death sentence.
The result is commensurate with the excess of this fascinating artist. Laura Poitras’ feature film is neither quite a classic documentary nor a traditional biography.
It is a hybrid object, produced in close collaboration with Nan Goldin, who confides in it on the darker aspects of her private life, in particular on her sex work and the impact that her big sister’s suicide had on his family in the 1960s.
Laura Poitras documented Nan Goldin’s militant fight against the Sackler family, forced in March 2021 to pay 4.28 billion US dollars as part of a plan to exit the bankruptcy of the pharmaceutical company Purdue, which she owned. and who marketed OxyContin.
Nan Goldin and her allies did not stop there. They continued to demand that museums withhold the family money and remove the Sackler name from their collections and buildings. At the same time, the photographer noticed that she was being watched at home by a private detective, and threats of lawsuits arrived. So much material to feed a documentary that sometimes takes on airs of suspense. And which is above all the sum of the commitment of two remarkable artists.
Indoors
Documentary
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
Laura Poitras
1:53 a.m.