An epic, emotional and interconnect ed story about internationally renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin told through her slideshows, intimate inter views, groundbreaking photography, and rare footage of her personal fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the opioid crisis.
Directed by Academy Award winning filmmaker Laura Poitras (Citizenfour), the film interweaves Goldin’s past and present, the deeply personal and urgently political, from P.A.I.N.’s actions at renowned art institutions to Goldin’s photography of her friends and peers through her epic The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and her legendary 1989, NEAcen sored AIDS exhibition, Witness: Against Our Vanishing.
The story begins with P.A.I.N., a group Goldin founded to shame muse ums into rejecting Sackler money, destigmatize addiction and promote harm reduction. Inspired by Act Up, they or chest rated protests to call attention to the toxic philanthropy of the Sackler family, whose company, Purdue Pharma, ignited the opioid epidemic with its block buster drug, OxyContin.
At the core of the film are Goldin’s art works The Ballad of Sexual Dependency; The Other Side; Sisters, Saints and Sibyls; and Memory Lost. In these works, Goldin captures her friendships with beauty and raw tenderness. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed won the Gold en Lion at the 79th Venice Film Festival.
The process of making this film was deeply intimate. Nan and I met on weekends in her living room and talk ed. I was first drawn to the present-day horror story of a billionaire family knowingly creating an epidemic, and then funneling money into museums in exchange for tax write offs and naming galleries. But as we talked, I realized this was only one part of the story I wanted to tell, and that the core of the film is Nan’s art, photography, and the legacies of her friends and sister Barbara. A legacy of people escaping America.

Laura Poitras