All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Artist Nan Goldin looks back at a life of documenting her friends in New York’s LGBTQ community. We are shown intimate photographic fragments from a lifetime of battles, moments of flamboyant joy, beautiful friendships and loss.

Most of the rare footage in All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is gleaned from Goldin’s archive, the influential series of photographs The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, plus documentation of her work in the sex industry. The revelation of power, that of men over women, lies at the heart of Goldin’s artwork, but now her focus shifts to reveal the power of big pharma.

Purdue Pharma, a pharmaceutical company owned by the Sackler family, is pursued by Goldin and her activist friends to hold to account the pain profiteers responsible for the devastating opioid epidemic that has caused countless deaths in the US.

Risking her career, she attacks the very institutions that exhibit her artwork – the Met, the Louvre, the Tate, the major galleries who have all accepted philanthropic donations from the Sackler family.

A moving combination of the personal and the political makes this an extraordinary, unforgettable film.

Programmed by Deptford Cinema, in collaboration with Music Room London.