March 13, 2023

Nan Goldin Documentary: „All the Beauty and the Bloodshed“

The documentary “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” about photographer Nan Goldin has already won a Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice International Film Festival and was nominated for an Oscar in 2023. But what is the film actually about and where can you watch it at the moment?

They have washed their blood money through the halls of museums and universities around the world.

Nan Goldin’s life was mesmerising even before she declared war on one of the most powerful families in the USA. The photographer is best known for her groundbreaking 1986 photobook “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”. The documentary “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” links biographical highlights of the artist with her activism against the Sackler family. The Sacklers are known as pharma billionaires and for their generous donations to museums and galleries. But they are also the ones behind the painkiller OxyContin and are accused in this context of being partly responsible for the current opioid crisis in the USA.

Nan Goldin herself was prescribed OxyContin in 2014 after an operation. By her own account, she quickly became addicted to the strong painkiller and struggled with her addiction for three years. She almost died from an overdose of fentanyl. It’s a fate she shares with many Americans, and one she wrote about in a 2018 issue of Artforum. In that article, she – like many people before her – blamed the Sackler family (“whose name I knew from museums and galleries” and whose company, Purdue Pharma, produced OxyContin) for the opioid addiction of hundreds of thousands of people. She founded the organisation P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) to fight the “reputational damage” of the Sackler name through large donations to museums and galleries. “To get their ear we will target their philanthropy,” Goldin wrote. “They have washed their blood money through the halls of museums and universities around the world.“

P.A.I.N. organised sensational protests. In February 2019, Goldin threatened to pull out of a planned retrospective of her work at London’s National Portrait Gallery if the museum accepted a £1 million donation from the Sacklers. A month later, the National Portrait Gallery became the first museum to forgo a donation from the Sacklers. Two days later, the Tate declared that it too would no longer accept funds from the Sacklers. Since then, many museums have either rejected Sackler’s donations or removed the name from their walls, including the Met, the Guggenheim, the British Museum, the Serpentine Galleries, the Louvre, the National Gallery in London, the South London Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Goldin is now using P.A.I.N. to advocate for better addiction treatment and harm reduction through overdose prevention centres.

“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”, the documentary by Oscar-winner Laura Poitras („Citizenfour“), covers Goldin’s life and work, with a focus on her P.A.I.N. activism. It won the Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice International Film Festival and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary in 2023.

In some countries, such as the USA and the UK, the documentary was already released in autumn last year and can now be streamed via HBO Max and Prime Video. In France, the film will be shown in cinemas from 15 March 2023. Film fans in Germany still have to be patient: Here, the theatrical release has been announced for 25 May 2023.