”All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” is a haunted film: painful memories and spectres of illness don’t cease to traverse it at every step, to the same extent it allows itself to be guided – through the famous artist Nan Goldin – by a vision of struggle and emancipation resolutely turned towards the future. The film depicts a complex temporal arc, where the activism of the present - Goldin runs a campaign against the Sackler family, a major and shady Big Pharma player - constitutes a profoundly coherent epilogue to a life lived in the name of freedom, of minorities, and an assumed rebellion. The documentary shapes itself around a series of constants – from the 1980s New York gay community, devastated by the AIDS epidemic, to the opioids of today, which cause addiction and bring profit that is subsequently “laundered” in the art world through various sponsorship campaigns -, as it circles around a biography which has proved, with a force that goes beyond slogans and clichés, that the personal is as political as it gets. (Victor Morozov)
Cinematography Nan Goldin
Editing Amy Foote, Joe Bini, Brian A. Kates
Production Howard Gertler, John Lyons, Nan Goldin, Yoni Golijov, Laura Poitras