A version of this interview with “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” director Laura Poitras first appeared in the Guild & Critics Awards/Documentaries issue of awards magazine TheWrap.
Laura Poitras has made an art of holding powerful people accountable, whether through her post-9/11 documentary trilogy featuring the Oscar-winning “Citizenfour” or through her study of Wikileaks and Julian Assange in “Risk.” . Now, with “All the beauty and the bloodshed”, art itself is the means to interrogate power.
The film, which won the Golden Lion in Venice, is a portrait of Nan Goldin, the renowned photographer and activist who has highlighted the role in the opioid crisis of the billionaire Sackler family, whose company, Purdue Pharma, manufactured and marketed OxyContin. Goldin and the group PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) have pressured museums that have accepted donations from the Sacklers to break all ties, staging demonstrations like the one that started it all in 2018, when bottles of prescription drugs were thrown at the Temple. of Dendur in Sackler Wing at the Met in New York.
A dialogue between past and present, the film weaves together archival footage and Goldin’s innovative slideshows to delve into her (often painful) life story and explore how her work has always been inextricably linked to grassroots activism. We spoke with Poitras about collaborating with Goldin on his acclaimed film.
Nan Goldin and PAIN had been filming their rallies against the Sacklers for a while when she asked you to be the director. What made you want to do it?
I was a little nervous going in because I’m like, it’s nan goldin. Which can me contribute to this project? And I think she felt her own nervous feeling that she’s talked about. But she really attracted me. It’s a bit similar to some of my other films, which generally focus on an individual or small group taking part in a political action that is changing the social landscape and criticizing power. I’ve known Nan’s artwork since making movies and I love it, but the connection (what interested me the most) was definitely the activism piece. As I learned more about his work and this show that he had curated during the AIDS crisis (“Witness: Against Our Disappearance”), it was also about drawing these parallels between the failure of the federal government and the AIDS crisis and how it was It relates to the current failure of the government and the overdose crisis.
At the New York Film Festival, Nan said during a public question-and-answer session that she was worried she might not be important enough for Laura Poitras to direct her film because she has no state secrets to reveal. That got a big laugh.
Right, she was worried about it. And I didn’t think it was important enough to make a movie about Nan Goldin. I think we were both a little intimidated. [Laughs]
Nan says in the movie, “Bad things are kept private in society and that destroys people,” which goes right to the heart of your movie. Nan talks about some deeply personal things (about her family and her addiction to OxyContin). I imagine it must have taken you two some time to find your balance, which is why she felt comfortable revealing so much.
I mean, sure. Both in the making of this film and in her own work, she goes to a place that artists rarely go, in terms of vulnerability and honesty. And like you said, this line about the wrong things being kept secret is one of the central themes of the movie: we live in societies where people are ashamed of things. Nan’s political activism is about destigmatizing, for example, addiction. The reason she talks about these issues is to provide a way for people to understand that they are not isolated, that they are not alone. And PAIN is very committed to changing shame, that shame doesn’t really belong to individuals. In reality, he belongs to the billionaires who profit from people’s pain and knowingly promote a drug that is causing mass deaths. So Nan was incredibly brave in her own work in terms of taking on these issues and then also trusting me.
The Sacklers obviously know their movie exists, but do you have any idea if anyone from their giant organization hydra has seen it?
When we opened it in Venice, we did the press conference and said, “Welcome back, all the Sackler family lawyers that I anticipated would join.” I mean, we go. Of course, they had people go and watch the movie and take notes and report back.
But you haven’t heard directly from them.
We communicate with them, of course (during production). They didn’t say much more than denial without denial about the “falsehoods.” You know, “of the $10 billion we take out of our company, we pay taxes and reinvest it in other partner companies.” As if that was some kind of defense.
Read more from the Guild & Critics / Documentary Awards edition here.
