All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022) is Laura Poitras's documentary, and you can watch online on iFILM. It works as both a portrait of photographer Nan Goldin and a record of her campaign against the Sackler family, whose pharmaceutical fortune was built on the painkillers that fueled the overdose crisis.

The film braids two threads. In one, Goldin narrates her own life through her slideshows: the downtown New York scene, sex work to pay rent, friends lost to AIDS, a sister driven to suicide. In the other, her activist group P.A.I.N. stages protests inside the galleries themselves, demanding that the Sackler name come off the walls of the Met, the Louvre and the Guggenheim. Goldin survived her own OxyContin addiction and talks about it plainly, never posing as a victim.

Poitras assembles all of it not as a lecture but as a living montage of memory, art and rage. The film took the Golden Lion at Venice and went on to an Oscar nomination — a rare case where a documentary lands as both an artist's confession and a dispatch from the front line. For anyone who values honest films about the cost of art and the weight of a single voice, this is essential. Stream All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022) online on iFILM.