The Documentary You're Sleeping On

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Laura Poitras 2022 documentary about photographer Nan Goldin activism against the Sackler family, won the Golden Lion at Venice and then seemed to vanish from conversation. It should not have.

Poitras made Citizenfour, the Edward Snowden film that won the documentary Oscar in 2015, and My Country, My Country in Iraq before that. She is a reporter first. This one took the Golden Lion at Venice in 2022, only the second documentary ever to do so after Sacro GRA in 2013, and was nominated for the documentary Oscar the following year.

The documentary interweaves Goldin personal history, her iconic photography of 1980s New York, her near-fatal opioid addiction, and her organization PAIN campaign to remove the Sackler name from major museums.

The photographic spine of the film is The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which Goldin built through the early 1980s. It was never a book first. It was a slideshow of several hundred images, shown in bars and clubs with a soundtrack, re-cut every time she ran it. The film uses it as it was meant to be used, as a sequence with music rather than prints on a wall, and that is the closest most people will get to the original form.

Poitras brings investigative rigor to the Sackler story. The film presents internal Purdue Pharma documents and testimony that builds a devastating case against the family knowing role in the opioid epidemic.

Goldin photography provides visual material that is both beautiful and brutal. Her images of friends lost to AIDS, of addiction, of intimacy and violence, are presented as evidence of a life spent in proximity to pain.

The campaign worked, which documentaries rarely get to show. The Louvre stripped the Sackler name from its wing in 2019. The Metropolitan Museum removed it from seven galleries in December 2021. The Serpentine and the Tate followed, and the National Portrait Gallery in London turned down a million-pound gift. Those are dates you can check, and they happened because a photographer who had been prescribed OxyContin after a wrist injury organised die-ins with a few dozen people.

The activism sequences are genuinely thrilling. Watching PAIN members stage die-ins at the Guggenheim creates a sense of possibility.

The film opens with the death of Goldin's sister Barbara, who died by suicide in 1965 at eighteen after years in institutions. Everything else hangs off it: the photography as a refusal to let people vanish from the record, the addiction, the campaign. Poitras cuts between chapters instead of running chronologically, and that structure is what turns a biography into an argument.

Stream on HBO Max or find at https://www.hbo.com/movies/all-the-beauty-and-the-bloodshed.

It runs 117 minutes and is heavier going than the synopsis suggests, particularly the AIDS material in the middle third. If it lands, read Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe, which covers the Sackler business history in detail no film has room for, and look at The Ballad in print, which Aperture keeps available for around forty pounds.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is essential because it connects art, activism, and accountability in a way that feels urgent. Watch it and you will never look at a museum donor wall the same way.