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VENICE, Italy (AP) — When filmmaker Laura Poitras went to meet American photographer Nan Goldin about a project to document her protests against museums accepting money from the Sackler family, Goldin was slightly worried.
“My worry
when she came on was that I didn’t have any state secrets to share and I wasn’t
important enough for this,” Goldin said Saturday in Venice.
The
Oscar-winning filmmaker behind the Edward Snowden documentary “Citizenfour” was
already in on the prospect of “the present-day horror story of a billionaire
family knowingly creating an epidemic, and then funneling money into museums in
exchange for tax write-offs and naming galleries,” she said. But soon she
realized this was only part of a much bigger story involving the whole of
Goldin’s life and work.
The result
is “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” which is having its world premiere at
the Venice Film Festival on Saturday, where it is part of the main competition
slate. Poitras, before the premiere, thanked the festival for recognizing that
“documentary is cinema.”
“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” is by all
accounts an epic, interweaving Goldin’s past and present through her works,
intimate conversations and powerful connections between the AIDS epidemic of
the 1980s and the overdose epidemic of today.
“We knew that we
didn’t want to make a biography film, or a typical artist portrait,” Poitras
said. “Nan’s life deserves an epic film, for what she’s done, what she’s accomplished
and the risks she’s taken. We wanted it to have an epic quality.”
Goldin,
whose work has always been about “removing stigma,” said her attention turned
to the Sacklers when she got out of a clinic to get sober. She had only known
the Sacklers as philanthropists, but then started reading articles about opioid
overdoses and Purdue Phama and knew she had to do something.
Sackler is a
name that has become synonymous with Purdue Pharma, the company that developed
OxyContin, a widely prescribed and widely abused painkiller. Purdue has faced a
barrage of lawsuits alleging that it helped spark an addiction and overdose
crisis linked to more than 500,000 deaths in the U.S. over the past two
decades.
Foundations
run by members of the Sackler family have given tens of millions of dollars to
museums, including the Guggenheim in New York and the Victoria and Albert
Museum in London, and funded work at Oxford and Yale.
“The things
I do are not a choice,” Goldin said. “My thought was how can I shame them amongst
their own social strata?”
In recent
years, the Guggenheim, the Louvre in Paris, the Tate in London and the Jewish
Museum in Berlin have all distanced themselves from the family, in part because
of Goldin’s protests. In 2019, the Met announced it would stop taking monetary
gifts from Sacklers connected to Purdue Pharma.
Now, Goldin
has turned her attention to harm reduction.
“We were
never anti-opioid,” Goldin said. “We were anti-overdose and people making money
off of overdose.”
Poitras said
they kept the project a little bit under the radar intentionally. It’s bound to
create “some nervousness” on boards, she thinks, as Poitras said the Sacklers
aren’t the only name doing this.
Neon
acquired the film last month for distribution and will release a retrospective
of Goldin’s work, opening Oct. 29 at Moderna Museet in Stockholm.
“My proudest
thing is we brought down a billionaire family,” Goldin said. “We brought one
down. So far.”
Follow AP
Film Writer Lindsey Bahr on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ldbahr
For more on
the Venice Film Festival, visit: www.apnews.com/VeniceFilmFestival