All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is an epic, emotional and interconnected story about internationally renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin told through her slideshows, intimate interviews, ground-breaking 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, 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, NEA-censored AIDS exhibition, “Witness: Against Our Vanishing.”

The story begins with P.A.I.N., a group Goldin founded to shame museums into rejecting Sackler money, destigmatize addiction and promote harm reduction. Inspired by Act Up, they orchestrated protests to call attention to the toxic philanthropy of the Sackler family, whose company, Purdue Pharma, ignited the opioid epidemic with its blockbuster 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. These friendships, and the legacy of her sister Barbara, anchor all of Goldin’s art.

I began working on this film with Nan in 2019, two years after she decided to leverage her power as an artist to expose the billionaire Sackler family’s criminal culpability in fueling the overdose crisis. The process of making this film was deeply intimate. Nan and I met on weekends in her living room and talked.
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 realised 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.

PRODUCTION 1: Jeff Skoll, Diane Weyermann – Participant
3520 Wesley Street
CA 90232 – Culver City, United States of America
Tel. +1 2132802273
lkim@participant.com
Facebook: @Participant
Instagram: @participant
Twitter: @Participant

PRODUCTION 2: Alex Kwartler, Hayley Theisen, Howard Gertler, John Lyons, Nan Goldin, Yoni Golijov, Laura Poitras

WORLD SALES: Mike Runagall – Altitude Film Sales
10, Orange Street
WC2H 7DE – London, United Kingdom
Tel. +44 7795847594
mikerunagall@altitudefilmsales.com

PRESS OFFICE: Claudia Tomassini – International Film Publicity
Saarbrücker Str 24
10405 Berlin
press@claudiatomassini.com
www.claudiatomassini.com

ITALIAN PRESS OFFICE: Claudia Tomassini – International Film Publicity
Saarbrücker Str 24
10405 Berlin
press@claudiatomassini.com
www.claudiatomassini.com