‘All the Beauty and the Bloodshed’: Towering Film About the War Against the Sackler Family

VIDEO – AMERICAN ROYALTY ABOVE THE LAW –

Oct. 7, 2022 – Worse, the Sacklers are billionaires whose name adorns dozens of international art museums, including some that feature Goldin’s own work—a fact that motivated Goldin to stage a 2018 protest at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Temple of Dendur wing that involved throwing pill bottles into the water and chanting “Sacklers lie! People die!”

That moment, as well as subsequent actions taken at the Guggenheim Museum and the Louvre, is captured first-hand by Poitras in All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. Concurrently, the director flashes back to Goldin’s past. The photographer narrating her numerous ordeals, beginning in “the banality and deadening grip of suburbia” with parents whom she claims were unfit to have children, and with an older sister, Barbara, whose unruliness earned her a trip to numerous psychiatric facilities, culminating in suicide.

Barbara’s unnecessary death was a formative experience for Goldin, as well as a rebellious spark, to the point that as a teenager, she was shipped off by her parents to a foster home. Repeatedly cast aside, Goldin nonetheless found her place among urban gay communities, courtesy of her friend David Armstrong. Moreover, she discovered the camera, which quickly became her vehicle for processing reality and herself.