When art and activism combine
Acclaimed documentary-maker Laura Poitras has made a film about photographer and anti-Purdue Pharma campaigner Nan Goldin
Not many people were betting on Laura Poitras’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed to win the Golden Lion at last September’s Venice Film Festival. It wasn’t just that titles such as Tár, The Banshees of Inisherin and Saint Omer were picking up good word.
Poitras’s documentary, weaving a biography of Nan Goldin in with a study of that photographer’s campaign against one corner of Big Pharma, had also received raves from all directions. But only one documentary had won in the festival’s 76-year history. (Cannes hasn’t even presented a doc in competition for over a decade.) In the event, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed followed in the footsteps of Rashomon, The Battle of Algiers and Brokeback Mountain to take the Lion.
Pic: Nan Goldin appearing in documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. Photograph: Handout
