All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, a new documentary about acclaimed photographer Nan Goldin and her activism around the Sackler family’s involvement in the U.S. opioid crisis, has received an Oscar nomination in the Best Documentary category.
The film surveys Goldin’s decades-long career and her more recent advocacy campaign through the group P.A.I.N., which has sought to raise awareness for the Sacklerses’ financial ties to major art institutions in the U.S. and abroad.
Goldin founded P.A.I.N. in 2017 after surviving an overdose on what she thought was dope. By that point, she had become addicted to OxyContin, the addictive painkiller produced by the Sackler family’s company, Purdue Pharma, which declared bankruptcy in 2021 amid legal actions.
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Directed by Laura Poitras, the film received the Golden Lion award at the Venice International Film Festival in September, becoming one of the few documentaries ever to have received the prize. Poitras’s 2014 documentary Citizenfour, which focuses on Edward Snowden, won the Best Documentary Oscar in 2015.
“Were Poitras’s film merely about how Goldin was moved to action, it would be powerful enough,” Alex Greenberger wrote in ARTnews as the film made its premiere at the New York Film Festival. “But Poitras goes one step further, threading that narrative through a remarkable recounting of Goldin’s evolution as a person and an artist. In All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, one of the great documentaries about an artist, any boundaries between activism and art, art and life, and life and work are blown open.”