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Laura Poitras’ documentary wins the 79th Venice Film Festival

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed shakes Venice. The Golden Lion again to a female director for the third year in a row

For the third consecutive time, after Diwan's tryumph in 2021 and Zhao in 2020 it is a film directed by a woman to win the Golden Lion in Venice, and for the second time, after Sacro Gra in 2013, it is a documentary.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed by Laura Poitras recounts the struggle of the American photographer Nan Goldin against the Sackler family, owner of the pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma, believed to be responsible for the opioid epidemic in the United States.

"I have not met anyone with his exceptional courage. - Said the American director, who had won an Oscar in 2015 for Citizenfour. -I dedicate the award to her who inspired me and to journalists and filmmakers like Panahi who take risks with their work ”.

SYNOPSIS

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is an epic, emotional and interconnected story about internationally renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin told through her slideshows, intimate interviews, ground-breaking photography, and rare footage of her personal fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the opioid crisis.

Directed by Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras, the film interweaves Goldin’s past and present, the deeply personal and urgently political, from P.A.I.N.’s 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 call attention to the toxic philanthropy of the Sackler family, whose company, Purdue Pharma, ignited the opioid epidemic with its blockbuster drug, OxyContin.

At the core of the film are Goldin’s art works “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.