'All the Beauty and the Bloodshed' chronicles the fight to purge one family's name from the art world

 

The campaign by American photographer Nan Goldin to shame galleries and museums into cutting ties with the Sackler families, the owners of OxyContin manufacturer Purdue Pharma, was always under a lens — that was part of its point. Beginning in 2018, a number of noisy protests at some of the art world's finest institutions, including the Met, the Guggenheim and the Louvre, were designed to attract as much publicity as possible as they highlighted the horrors of the United States' opioid epidemic and called out Purdue Pharma's role in it. They proved highly effective.

Among those documenting the protests was Goldin herself, working with the activist group she cofounded called P.A.I.N (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now). Knowing the artist wanted to create a film about what they were doing, the group filmed with producer-friends for months until Goldin met Laura Poitras, an Oscar-winning director who would make it a reality.

In that way, Poitras' now Oscar-nominated documentary, "All the Beauty and the Bloodshed," began in the hands of its subject — and much like one of Goldin's own artworks, it ended up in a very different place from where it started.

To Poitras — whose 2015 Oscar-winning documentary "Citizenfour" explored how whistleblower Edward Snowden took on the US government over its surveillance practices — Goldin's situation initially seemed like another David and Goliath story. The photographer says she had survived an addiction to OxyContin, which she'd started taking after a surgery in 2014, and was using her clout to call out what she saw as "artwashing" — or using cultural investments to distract from controversy — on the part of the Sacklers, who have previously denied wrongdoing related to the opioid crisis. But after Goldin began confiding in Poitras, the portrait of the artist changed; so did the story both would end up telling.

"All the Beauty and the Bloodshed," which became only the second documentary to ever win the Golden Lion for best film at the 2022 Venice Film Festival, and is also nominated for a BAFTA, begins in 2018. It follows Goldin's successful campaign, which resulted in many prominent galleries refusing Sackler money, and the Met, the Louvre and others eventually purging the Sackler name from buildings. (After Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy in 2019, the company and the Sackler families reached a $6 billion opioid settlement with a group of states and the District of Columbia in 2022. As part of the deal, they agreed to allow any institution or organization nationwide to remove the Sackler name from facilities and academic, medical, and cultural programs, scholarships, and endowments, as long as the Sacklers were notified first and announcements regarding the name removal did not "disparage" the families.)

Entwined with that thread is a defiant and devastating retelling of the artist's decades of activism and life among New York's LGBTQ subculture. Then, there is the story of Goldin's own family tragedy.