An artist's origin story, and an activist's present-day procedural.

If you are familiar with Nan Goldin and her work, then great! If not, then trust me, once you watch this doc, you too will be in absolute awe of Nan Goldin's radical honesty about love, art and everything else that she so deeply cares about.

'All the Beauty and the Bloodshed' is one of the best directed and edited pieces of art to come out in recent years. Incredibly powerful, hugely compelling, and so moving. Nan Goldin's personal life, and her fight against the Sackler family & Purdue Pharma (Pharmaceutical company responsible for the drug 'OxyContin' and the death of over 500 thousand people in the last 20 years)
go hand in hand in of the story and narrative structure, but most importantly they elevate and complement each other every step of the way, in this decades long in-depth story that's talks about an artist, a sister, a daughter, an activist, a warrior, i.e Nan Goldin.

Time and time again director Laura Poitras (CitizenFour, Risk, Project X, etc.) has shown us that she is one of the best documentary filmmakers the medium has ever seen, and here once again she shows us that she has an incredible command over her storytelling. Poitras manages to keep an unbelievable balance between the two stories of Nan Goldin's life, which must have been an incredibly challenging task.

In the beginning of the doc Goldin says many people told her, “Nobody photographs their own life.” That it was even rarer for women to want to make a living from this type of a job. Towards the end she says a similar line, but with a slightly different and heartbreaking detail, "After what happened to my sister, I started taking pictures of everything I did, so that people would believe me."
That sums up what this incredibly talented and beautiful soul of an artist has been through all her life.
One of the best documentaries to come out in recent years, and a very essential one for our current times.