All the Beauty and the Bloodshed lives up to its title

tor tackles the acute issue of pharmaceutical companies, and does so primarily by depicting the life of Nan Goldin; a life depicted as a composition of photographs and struggles, both intimately intertwined to give each other greater resonance.

work about and with Nan Goldin. The result is a portrait: of Goldin, of the issues and power dynamics at play in Goldin's life, of a struggle against Purdue Pharma after Goldin’s own addiction to Oxycontin.

Laura Poitras' new directorial e ort, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022), is a documentary which o ers a fragmented narrative of P.A.I.N's struggle against the Sackler family-owned Purdue Pharma pharmaceutical industry, which is responsible for the opioid crisis in the US.

While Poitras routinely makes harrowing documentaries that cut a stark image of the ‘backstage’ world, audiences may never get used to their electroshock e ect. In All the Beauty and the Bloodshed the direc-

American photographer and activist, Nan Goldin is a founding member of the advocacy group P.A.I.N (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), an organisation founded in 2017 in response to the opioid crisis and which protests speci cally against the production and distribution of Oxycontin by the Sackler family company.

In the early days of her work, Nan Goldin began lming the actions of P.A.I.N and some members of the organisation had the ambition to develop a documentary giving voice to their struggle. Poitras became involved in this project, and her documentary turned into a

The coming together of these two women to speak with one voice has a de facto natural legitimacy. Both Goldin and Poitras are artists whose works are continually at risk, due to the societal norms they question, and who display a wholehearted dedication to the causes they defend. Indeed, both make minor voices speak in their art and show bodies saturated, wounded and made precarious by the voices of American imperialism. Poitras illustrated these themes especially through My Country, My Country (2006), where she gave voice to Dr Riyadh al-Adhadh against the American occupation of Iraq, or through Citizenfour (2014), a doc- umentary about and with Edward Snowden. Likewise, Goldin’s photographs of lives within the American queer community show the e ects of the HIV virus and, more broadly, living on the fringe of society. Additionally photographs of her family life after the suicide of her sister, who su ered from the non-consideration of psychiatric authorities, share a similar polemical approach.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is two things: a description of P.A.I.N's struggle against the Sackler family and a collaborative work of art which questions the foundations of American identity. The documentary is an outcry against the US allowing the enrichment of corporations through the abuse of power, erce psychological brutalisation and the sweeping away of all considerations of justice. Purdue Pharma's imperialism over sick bodies, ad- dicted minds and su ocating escape routes is exposed over 121 minutes. The parallels drawn with fragments of Goldin's life, portrayed by Poitras, underline the gap between hegemonic forces and local hotbeds of resistance.

By inserting photographs taken by Goldin into the documentary's narrative, alternating between the festive and intimate as well as the truly dark, Poitras succeeds in bringing to the centre what a society that promotes justice and freedom should look like.

The lm is an impactful mosaic of interviews with P.A.I.N. members; fragments of Goldin's own life; the responsible faces of the Sackler family reacting to testimonies and complaints during a Zoom call; and videos of P.A.I.N's actions in various museums.

[To Read the full piece, head over to the Epigram website!]