All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Nan Goldin is a documentarian’s dream. Take any aspect of her life – a troubled upbringing in the conservative confines of 1960s suburbia defined by profound tragedy and loss, her extraordinary career in which she captured the raw beauty of people and places that society had deemed insignificant, or her work as an activist and her recent mission to hold the Sackler family accountable for their part in the opioid crisis – just one of these threads would generate ample material for a complete work in and of itself. But it takes a filmmaker of Citizenfour director Laura Poitras’ vision to combine all three in a single work that explores the complex intersections between trauma, art, addiction and activism. A fascinating film that its fascinating subject deserves.

Michael Blyth

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