Laura Poitras, Nan Goldin, Harry Cullen, Megan Kapler – All the beauty and the bloodshed #Venezia79

PODCAST | David Martos interviews Laura Poitras, Nan Goldin, Harry Cullen, Megan Kapler, director and actors of the film All the beauty and the bloodshed.

Laura Poitras brings a new documentary to Venice Film Festival, a new film that’s competing for the Golden Lion in the Mostra. All the beauty and the bloodshed tells the story of photographer Nan Goldin, how she fight for the visibility of people with AIDS and then decided to launch PAIN. It’s an organization that tries to make the world aware of the thousands of people that became addicted to drugs because of the pharmaceutical companies owned by the Sackler family. In FRED we talk to the director and three of the subjects of the documentary, including Nan Golding herself.

All the beauty and the bloodshed: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is an epic, emotional story about internationally renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin told through her slideshows, intimate dialogue, ground-breaking photography and rare footage of her fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the overdose crisis. The film interweaves Goldin’s past and present, the deeply personal and urgently political, from P.A.I.N.’s actions at renowned art institutions to Goldin’s photography of her friends and peers through her devastating The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and her legendary 1989, NEA-censored AIDS exhibition Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing. The story begins with P.A.I.N., a group she founded to shame museums into rejecting Sackler money, destigmatize addiction and promote harm reduction. Inspired by Act Up, they orchestrated protests to expose the Sacklers and the crimes of their Purdue Pharma, makers of OxyContin. At the core of the film are Goldin’s art works The Ballad of Sexual Dependency; The Other Side; Sisters, Saints and Sibyls; and Memory Lost. In these works, Goldin captures her friendships with beauty and raw tenderness. These friendships, and the legacy of her sister Barbara, anchor all of Goldin’s art.