August 4, 2026
By: Janis Cole

Watching the no-holds-barred portrait of Nan Goldin that spans a range of germane topics was a very personal experience. It’s the richest, most memorable film I’ve seen in years. 

The film weaves multiple narratives, each with gold-mined material; covering highs and lows in Goldin’s extraordinary life; her remarkable photo, slideshow and multimedia art; a verité capture of her unguarded activism with the group she started, P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) to combat the “artwashing” of Sackler money; and an extremely personal account of the relationship between trauma and productivity. Laura Poitras spins all this and more masterfully, with a rarely seen intimacy between filmmaker and subject. 

Young Goldin experienced an unsteady home life and the loss of her adored older sister Barbara, first to institutions and, at only eighteen, to suicide. A three-channel video installation she made about her sister’s suicide goes right to the heart, and the film gets its deeply meaningful title from a line in her institutional medical records. The wrenching loss of her sister is an irreparable, lifelong ache, with no emotional outlet at home or otherwise for a struggling eleven-year-old.

A few years after Barbara’s death teenaged Goldin is sent to foster homes and finds her way to a gay underworld of early 70s drag queens and artists that becomes her tribe. Introduced to photography, she finds a cathartic release by photographing her subculture and friends. Through hard work, determination and the good fortune of early representation she built a name for herself, and eventually became an internationally renowned photographer of the raw human experience, her own included. This alone is a tough and beautiful story.

Instead of resting on her success she uses it, loudly, risking her reputation in the arts during the onset of the AIDS epidemic, and again to take on the Sackler family and their role in the Opioid crisis. Her standing in major museums is on the line each time P.A.I.N. members stage public actions to demand art galleries stop accepting Sackler money, and also remove the Sackler name. Actions carried out by P.A.I.N. are not only smart and inventive, they’re visually stunning. 

Poitras connects the HIV/AIDS epidemic that started in the 1980s to the Opioid crisis going on for more than two decades by tying systemic indifference to Goldin’s activism, and gets powerful results. Silence=Death was the mantra of early ACT UP activists in response to the AIDS stigma that kept governments, media and the public silent. The outcry to both crises while deaths are escalating is from activists. Goldin adding her voice is grounded in personal experience, having lost most of her close artist friends to AIDS, and experiencing addiction when OcyContin was prescribed for pain management following a surgery. Millions of lives have been lost to AIDS and Opioids. It took a decade before medication was finally available in the mid 90s to slow HIV/AIDS deaths. Prevention, safety and recovery for Opioid addiction is even slower; treatment is not even close to being widely available. 

Early trauma, abandonment and quickly learned survival skills by necessity form Goldin’s moral compass that guides her work, activism and life choices, which Poitras handles superbly. Their mutual trust is evident throughout the film in Poitras’s respectful handling of Goldin’s vulnerability. Audiences are transported to dark places and social injustices that need public attention and action instead of being white-washed and ultimately dismissed.

The film isn’t light viewing, it’s harrowing in parts but ultimately triumphant, offering moments of deep warmth when Goldin is with friends, showing her art, and working with P.A.I.N., especially when they hear news of outcomes at the Louvre, Met, Guggenheim, and more. Goldin choosing to make the private public, and the personal political gets resounding results, and forms a blueprint for future generations of social activists.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed offers a way through trauma and darkness, exemplified beautifully in Poitras’s portrait of world-wise artist Nan Goldin. A documentary not to be missed.

2022, 122 minutes. Director: Laura Poitras, for producers, editors and cast, IMDB. 

Nominated for an Oscar. Winner of the Golden Lion in Venice. The film is available for sale and rental on Apple TV, YouTube, Tubi (where I rented it) and others.

Great friends recommended the film to me. Thank you Alice and Lo. ❤️

Further viewing: The aggressive marketing of OxyContin, and deceit of it being highly addictive was led by Richard Sackler through his family owned Purdue Pharma, and is portrayed in the critically acclaimed docu-drama series Dopesick, created by Danny Strong. IMDB. Check for it on Apple TV and Disney+

I wish to thank my site manager Tim Tripp for his support.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed official trailer.