Dir. Laura Poitras
Year. 2022
Country: USA
Run-time: 122 mins
Rating: 15
Free film, no booking. Please arrive early as seating is limited.
Doors: 4.30pm Film: 5pm
10% discount on drinks. Just show your ticket at the bar.
“Photograph’s like a flash of euphoria and it gave me a voice” says artist Nan Goldin as she looks back at her life documenting the life and loves of those around her - her friends in the New York LGBTQ community of the 80s and 90s.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed gives us beautiful photographic fragments from a lifetime of battles, moments of flamboyant joy, of intimacy, friendship and loss in a marginalised community. Most of the rare footage we see is gleaned from Nan Goldin’s archive, not only from her influential series of photographs, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, but also from her work in the sex industry and her documentation of the physical abuse from a partner. The revelation of power, the power of men over women, is at the heart of Nan’s motivation, but now her focus shifts to the power of big Pharma.
Purdue Pharma, a pharmaceutical company owned by the Sackler family, is pursued by Nan and her activist friends in order to hold to account the pain profiteers responsible for the devastating opioid epidemic that has caused thousands of deaths in the US. Risking her career, she attacks the very institutions that exhibit her work - the Met, the Louvre, the Tate, the major art galleries who have all accepted their philanthropic donations, art washing the profits of these billionaires.
This cinematic collaboration between two fearless artists - Nan Goldin and Laura Poitras - has already received the accolade of Winner of Best Film at the 79th Venice Film Festival and is likely to be garnered with many other major awards. The brilliance of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed lies in the interlacing of its stirring subject of courageous activism with intimate conversations and tragic revelations from Nan. An emotional combination of the personal and the political makes this an extraordinary, unforgettable film.
This film is being screened as part of New Cross and Deptford Free Film Festival. Please note there are no tickets or reservations and seats will be offered free on a first-come first-served basis. You are welcome to bring cash donations to support the free film festival. Thank you.
““Sharp, intrepid and compassionate in her direction, Poitras casts the viewer under a hypnotic spell that’s equally charged by Goldin’s recollections on the personal tragedies that have helped to motivate her fight against the Sacklers.” ”
““Calling All The Beauty And The Bloodshed a “love letter to cinema” feels reductive, especially in the recent trend of fiction features paying homage to the silver screen. But Laura Poitras’ searing documentary, about the life and work of photographer Nan Goldin, is exactly that: an urgent portrait of the genuinely life-saving power of art, to honour and remember the dead, and demand that the living do more.” ”
