All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is an epic, emotional story about the life of internationally renowned American photographer and activist Nan Goldin, told through her slideshows, intimate interviews, groundbreaking photography and rare footage.
Usually more celebrated for her intimate, explicit, and often cinematic photographs of friends and lovers in the LGBTQ subcultures of 1980s–90s New York and the effects of the HIV/AIDS crisis, in 2017 Nan Goldin began speaking about her terrifying experience with Purdue Pharma's wildly successful painkiller OxyContin. Aggressively marketed by Purdue as non-addictive, the mounting evidence that OxyContin was, in fact, lethally addictive, was not only ignored but exploited for financial gain.
Founding the organisation PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), Goldin began campaigning against galleries and museums benefiting from associated donation funds.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed tells a moving story about how this artist navigates her relationship with America and how its systems of power and profit interact with and exploit individual bodies and lives.
Directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras (Citizenfour), the film interweaves Goldin’s past and present, the deeply personal and urgently political.
You have a second chance to catch the film when it returns to the screen at Film Unit in May.
- Words by
- Joe Harris
- Featured in
- LGBTQ+ History Month in Sheffield