All the Beauty and the Bloodshed * * *

I was hoping this would be a retrospective of the photographic art of Nan Goldin. 

But from the beginning I realised we are going to go down another path.  One that took me quite by surprise, and one that I wasn't particularly interested in to be honest.  Nothing is more boring than watching a bunch of chanting protestors disrupting a public place, no matter how worthy their cause.

After about twenty minutes we go down another road and the documentary becomes all about Goldin's sister. "Her sister?!" I thought.  "Where are we going with this?!"  But actually, hers was a fascinating and tragic story and you could see how her awful life would have impacted upon Golding. 

Okay it's coming together, but where's Goldin's photography?  

Don't mess with my health, says Nan.

Finally we get there. And her own voice over tells us how she started; about her slideshows, her first photographs, the people in her life, and how her style developed. This was good stuff.  It was what I was here for.

But soon we return to today and how Goldin is gambling with her next exhibition and threatening to withdraw if the gallery doesn't drop the sponsors.  

The sponsors are the Sackville family.  The same family that sponsor many other great galleries around the world (including the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and even the Louvre).  

The Sackville family own companies that develop, manufacture and distribute OxyContin opiate, to which hundreds of thousands of people have been, or still are, addicted, including - you guessed it - Nan Goldin.  Nan Goldin is focused on bringing the Sackville family to account through protests, boycotts, creating public awareness and even suing them.

You will get to see Goldin's work, including the 1980's when she was living in the edgy parts of  Boston and New York with the misunderstood and shunned at that time: Basically the LGBTIQ. But I never felt  that was the main focus of this documentary. 

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is directed by Laura Poitras so she knows what she is doing.  She turns one out every year or so. 

Like Citizenfour its a pretty good documentary about someone bringing a goliath of an organisation to account.  

But if you simply want a film on the photographic art of Goldin, you might be frustrated by the amount of screen time given over to another matter.