All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is an epic, emotional story about internationally renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin told through her slideshows, intimate dialogue, ground-breaking photography and rare footage of her fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the overdose crisis. 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 devastating The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and her legendary 1989, NEA-censored AIDS exhibition Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing. The story begins with P.A.I.N., a group she founded to shame museums into rejecting Sackler money, destigmatise addiction and promote harm reduction. Inspired by Act Up, they orchestrated protests to expose the Sacklers and the crimes of their Purdue Pharma, makers of 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. These friendships, and the legacy of her sister Barbara, anchor all of Goldin’s art. (Venice International Film Festival)