fter winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in September — exceptional for a documentary — and being screened at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) the following week, the film All the Beauty and the Bloodshedby Laura Poitras, is finally presented in Quebec twice this week as part of the International Documentary Meetings of Montreal (RIDM).
The American filmmaker delivers here her first portrait of an artist. She follows the illustrious photographer Nan Goldin, known for her series entitled The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, during his militant activities against the Sackler family. Widely considered to be responsible for the opioid crisis in the United States, the Sacklers own, among other things, the company Purdue Pharma, which has developed controversial painkillers, such as oxycodone, which have caused numerous overdoses. They are also great philanthropists in the art world. Nan Goldin is still fighting to have their names removed from museums, and those of their victims not sink into oblivion.
If Laura Poitras is above all accustomed to carrying out heavy quasi-journalistic investigations – we owe her in particular Citizenfour (2014) and My Country, My Country (2006) —, All the Beauty, very different, is nonetheless political. The documentary reveals the intrinsically committed nature of Goldin’s work, from his photographic work to his activism. The duty seized the opportunity of the presentation of the film at the RIDM to discuss it with the director.
What led you in the footsteps of Nan Goldin?
When Nan created her organization PAIN [pour Prescription Addiction Intervention Now], which we see in the film, the group quickly committed to documenting what they were doing. The organization was founded in 2017, and since then its members have started filming their activities. Before embarking on the project, I was already following what he was doing, and I already knew Nan, I knew his work. From a distance, I was very excited for her to use her power in the art world to expose the hypocrisy of the Sackler family.
One day we met for dinner, and she told me everything. She said to me: “We filmed everything. She added that she was looking for a producer, that she wanted to involve more people. After that, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I became a little obsessed and, later, I said to him: “If ever you are looking for someone to direct…” We had another meeting afterwards, and we launched the project. I was a bit intimidated by her, I wanted to make sure I was the right filmmaker for the movie, but I was obsessed with the idea and her work.
The main subject of the film remains Nan Goldin’s activism against the Sackler family, but it nevertheless approaches the entirety of his work with a historical and philosophical perspective. How did this approach come about, and what attracted you to his work?
Talking about his work in the film came naturally. Both the film production process and Nan’s story led me to deal with all these subjects, because all of his work is political. His work is revolutionary. She created a new photographic language, presenting her creations in slideshow events (stuff), with music. There was a lot of intimacy in the relationship between her, as a photographer, and her subjects, who were her friends or her lovers. This intimacy was, in itself, revolutionary.
So it was the intimacy of her work that attracted me, but also her bravery, how she dared to show the world by rejecting the status quo, by celebrating marginalized or queer people. She created a whole new vocabulary by which people could recognize each other [pour la première fois] in a world that normally forces them to conform.
This film is unique in your filmography. How did you experience filming art as a subject for the first time?
As soon as you make a film, you necessarily place it in a genre linked to its subject. I thought there were a lot of movies about famous people, and I had to add something [de plus] to this “gender”. I didn’t want to make a film just about one person, but rather about the larger political issues surrounding that person. I was into it, and I needed to feel that Nan could be too. The project was therefore very collaborative.
I was really excited to work with someone whose work I have great respect for. If Nan hadn’t believed in the film, I wouldn’t have wanted it released. It’s a very sincere film.
Photographers have a reputation for not always being comfortable in front of the camera. How did you earn Nan Goldin’s trust to produce such an intimate portrait?
I definitely earned his trust, that’s what I had to do. As a director, I had the ” final cut », but we agreed on the fact that if she wanted to add (or remove) a particularly intimate element to the editing, for example, she could do it. Also, all of the interviews I did with her were audio-only. It helped a lot for her to open up intimately. We were just her and I during the interviews, and they were very powerful.