Laura Poitras won the Oscar for best documentary in 2015 for Citizenfour, about whistleblower Edward Snowden, who denounced digital espionage, particularly from the United States. In All the Beauty and the BloodshedGolden Lion at the most recent Venice Film Festival, the American filmmaker is interested in another rebellious character who challenges the established order.
“I’ve known a lot of brave people in my life, but no one like Nan Goldin,” the director said when she received her prestigious award last September. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed will be presented this Friday as part of the International Documentary Meetings of Montreal, before hitting theaters on December 2.
The famous American 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 having marketed this drug without warning of its addictive effects and of having fueled the opioid crisis.
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), dedicated to the prevention of overdoses.
PHOTO SETH WENIG, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Nan Goldin, during a protest in court where the case of pharmaceutical company Purdue’s bankruptcy exit plan was being heard, in August 2021, in White Plains, New York
The artist leads with his group, made up of people addicted to opioids 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.
Like my film on Ed Snowden, it’s a portrait of someone who takes a stand against powerful people. But it’s also a film about society more broadly.
Laura Poitras, director
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed deals with the activism, work and life of Nan Goldin, who has long photographed her friends in the queer counterculture of Boston and then of the Bowery district of New York. Transvestites, poets, writers, filmmakers, but also ordinary people, prostitutes or drug addicts of the 1970s and 1980s, at a time when an AIDS diagnosis was equivalent to a death sentence.
“I was introduced to Nan in the mid-1980s when I was studying film. She had just published the book version of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency “, explained to me this week in an interview by Zoom Laura Poitras (whose grandfather was from Quebec). The two artists were able to discuss a few years ago, during the presentation of Citizenfour at a film festival in Portugal. “She knew my work and I knew her work. There was a lot of mutual respect between us. »
PHOTO PROVIDED BY NEON, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Nan Goldin in All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
Learning that Nan Goldin had begun to film her militant demonstrations in museums against the Sackler family incognito, Laura Poitras offered to make a feature film. But when the photographer confided in the filmmaker, in particular on the impact that the suicide of her big sister had on her family in the 1960s, Laura Poitras understood that her film would not be a documentary on the militancy of Nan Goldin nor a traditional biography, but a more vague object.
We started doing interviews and she told me something very personal, very raw and very deep, that I hadn’t anticipated. It became the heart of the film. I took it very seriously. I didn’t want to ruin everything. Above all, I hoped to be up to it!
Laura Poitras, director
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is a film that the two artists made in collaboration, bound by a tacit agreement: at any time, the photographer could ask the filmmaker to remove biographical elements that she considered too intimate.
“It was important for me to be faithful to his words and his experience,” says Laura Poitras. We did several interviews. I remain the director of the film, I had the last word, but I wouldn’t have kept anything in the editing that could make her uncomfortable. There are several delicate subjects: his sister, but also his own sex work. »
Laura Poitras also of course documented the militant struggle of Nan Goldin, when it began to bear fruit. In March 2021, the Sackler family agreed to pay US$4.28 billion as part of a bankruptcy exit plan from pharmaceutical company Purdue, which they owned and which 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.
Laura Poitras was she afraid of not coming to the end of her film, because of the threats of lawsuits from this billionaire family? “Each film involves a different type of risk,” says the filmmaker, who has also made documentaries on the occupation of Iraq and on Julian Assange. I was fortunate, when I was doing my documentary about the National Security Agency and Edward Snowden, to have pro bono legal advice. There are many people who feel these stories need to be told and who believe in the importance of engaged journalism. »
She says she is very proud of her new film, acclaimed in Venice and carried by two women who are fearless. “We’re both pretty intense,” she laughs. I believe that joining forces has created something quite powerful. I’m sure when the Sacklers found out we were going to do the movie together, they couldn’t have been thrilled! »
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed will be presented at the Cinéplex Odéon Quartier Latin cinema this Friday evening at 8:15 p.m., as part of the International Documentary Meetings of Montreal. The film will be released in theaters on Friday, December 2.