All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras returns with the extraordinary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, recent winner of the Golden Lion at Venice International Film Festival. The film follows the iconoclastic artist and pugnacious activist Nan Goldin, famed for her vital and poignant photographs of artists and hustlers in the Bohemian East Village.The film provides an intimate overview of Goldin’s life and career. In recent years she has spearheaded a series of impassioned protests in famous Art Galleries, demonstrating against the Sackler family for their role in the opioid crisis.

I’ve never met anyone like Nan. [And] my films tend to follow political issues. They tend to follow individuals who are leading an effort to fight for some notion of justice or accountability. As Nan and I started doing these audio interviews at her house on the weekends usually, it became really emotionally deep really quickly. And that led to the other, more personal layer of the film. Documentary is cinema.

Director Laura Poitras