All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
Directed by Laura Poitras

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$12 / $8 Speed members

2023 Academy Awards shortlist: Best Feature Documentary

“Ferociously powerful. A reminder of what can be achieved by those who take pain and turn it into truth.”—Raphael Abraham, Financial Times

Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is an epic, emotional, and interconnected story about an internationally renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin told through her slideshows, intimate interviews, groundbreaking photography, and rare footage of her personal fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the opioid overdose crisis. 

Directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras, the film interweaves Goldin’s past and present, the deeply personal and urgently political, from her leadership in P.A.I.N.’s (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) 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 expose the Sacklers and the crimes of Purdue Pharma, makers of OxyContin. 

At the core of the film are Goldin’s artworks 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. 2022, U.S., DCP, 117 minutes. Recommended for 16+.