That title. Even before it screened, “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” cast a shiver across the Venice Film Festival competition, sounding more like a line from a Yeats poem than the latest documentary from the director of “CITIZENFOUR.” The big news: the film lives up to it. Already a robust director, Laura Poitras has leveled up with a towering and devastating work of shocking intelligence and still greater emotional power.To get more news about Lilac June Tingting, you can visit our official website.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” is about the life and art of Nan Goldin and how this led her to found P.A.I.N (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), an advocacy group targeting the Sackler Family for manufacturing and distributing OxyContin, a deeply addictive drug that has exacerbated the opioid crisis. It is about the bonds of community, the dangers of repression, and how art and politics are the same thing.

The biggest compliment is that this film is worthy of Goldin, a woman whose words are as stark as her art, and whose art shows our most intimate and vulnerable selves. To this day, Goldin is known for her breakout photography collection “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” which includes joyfully candid images of the queer family she had at the Bowery in ’80s New York, self-portraits of sex with her boyfriend, and then her face with two black eyes after he later did his utmost to kill her.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” opens with shaky video footage from P.A.I.N’s first piece of direct action in The Sackler Wing of The Metropolitan Museum in 2018. They chant “Sacklers lie, people die” and then lie on the ground feigning death. Goldin later reveals that she is inspired by the protest methods of ACT UP during the ’80s. It won’t be the first parallel that she or Poitras make between the AIDS and the opioid crises, and the politics of how certain people are left to die in America.

Poitras then takes us back to the suburban house where Nan grew up. Of her beloved older sister, Barbara, Goldin says, “She made me aware of the banal and deadening grip of suburbia,” speaking with a piercing affect that never lets up, not for a single answer, giving the narrative of her sprawling life the propulsive gait of a panther. For her part, Poitras understands the connections between events decades apart to such a degree that every detail included from a dysfunctional ’50s upbringing will later pay-off in tens of different ways, so that this film achieves the monumental task of turning episodes from a life into one side of a perfectly intact shape.

We are told at this early stage that Barbara died by suicide. Nan then got the hell out of there, warned by doctors that if she stayed at home, the same fate would be hers. “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” is dedicated to Barbara. The storytelling around Nan’s biography, her queer family, art, and what it looks like to take on the billionare Sackler family are so thoroughly absorbing that it is only at the end when everything circles back to Barbara, following the testimonies of family members who lost children to opioid overdoses, that one realizes that grief has been the emotional bedrock all along.
Poitras expertly moves from past to present, interviewing the investigative journalist, Patrick Radden Keefe, whose expose of the Sackler family in the 2017 New Yorker article “The Family Who Built An Empire of Pain” resulted in his house being staked out by a shady figure in an SUV. Poitras is on home turf when it comes to investigative storytelling and she digs out old adverts from after 1996, when OxyContin was launched in the states by the Sackler Company’s corporation Purdue Pharma. To combat the population’s fears they released reassuring commercials, and a man in a suit makes a direct address to the camera as he tells lies about OxyContin being non-addictive.