Oscar-nominated for Best Documentary
Whether you know the work of activist artist Nan Goldin or not, ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED is a film that will rivet you—and keep you thinking about what you’ve seen and the emotions it stirs in you for a long time afterwards. Already showered with Best Film and/or Best Documentary Film honors from the New York and Los Angeles Film Critics Awards and the Venice Film Festival, Laura Poitras’ (Oscar winner for CITIZENFOUR) film is a lock for an Oscar nomination this year, and has a great shot of adding another to its list of laurels. Poitras follows Goldin’s singular history as a great countercultural photographer and as a person with her own history with addictive pharmaceuticals. But Goldin channels her rage into effective social action, focusing on the Sackler family’s use of their blood money to support art museums, which looked the other way at where their money came from, honoring them by naming the names of their galleries for them in exchange for their “gifts.” "The film is a gem....And that isn’t all. This portrait belongs to a much larger societal landscape…. 'All the Beauty and the Bloodshed' becomes a tale of the opioid epidemic (roughly 500,000 dead in the U.S. alone), which was and is a human-made tragedy. That tragedy made Purdue Pharma, and its controlling family, the art-loving, image-conscious Sackler clan, extraordinarily wealthy thanks to OxyContin and other insidiously popular painkillers…..Poitras and her creative team have entwined two, even three stories to create a narrative of an American saga bridging the second half of the 20th century and the early 21st”—Owen Gleiberman, Variety.
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