Five stars for opioid epidemic documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Some documentaries go macro, giving a broad overview of an urgent subject, fully loaded with arresting facts and figures; others go narrow, focusing on an individual case to illuminate the bigger picture. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the ferociously powerful new film by Laura Poitras (Citizenfour), does both. It is a biographical portrait of the photographer Nan Goldin and an indictment of the role played by certain members of the billionaire Sackler family in the opioid epidemic that has claimed 500,000 American lives and counting. Connecting the two are Goldin, her unsparingly honest art and her campaign to have the Sackler name removed from the world’s most prestigious galleries and museums.

Goldin is all things to this story — victim, survivor and avenger — and it comes as an invaluable gift to Poitras that the artist has been documenting her life since her teens. And what a life it’s been. Given up by her parents to foster care at 14, she was struck dumb by trauma until rediscovering her voice through photography. Drifting into a 1970s underground arts scene fuelled by drugs and fluid sexuality, first in her hometown and then in lower Manhattan, she spent time as a gogo dancer and — she reveals here — as a sex worker in order to buy the materials for her practice. Presenting her work to a New York gallerist for the first time, she was told: “Nobody photographs their own life” — the concept as radical then as that statement seems absurd now.

Her celebrated 1985 slideshow exhibition The Ballad of Sexual Dependency kick-started her career in earnest but also marked a low point. In graphic terms, it showed her battery at the hands of a boyfriend, which left her in need of reconstructive facial surgery and addicted to opioids. It is here that the film’s two strands dovetail. Goldin’s harrowing personal history of abandonment and abuse serves as a stark example of how anyone’s life can send them into the death-spiral of dependency and how the makers of OxyContin have preyed on and profited from such people.

Goldin narrowly avoided death; we see testimonies from the parents of those less fortunate given during an online court hearing. The heartbreak etched into their faces as they describe watching their children die is unforgettable; the stony faces of the three Sacklers forced to listen, seemingly unmoved, is unforgivable. Goldin comes off the video call quaking.

Taking inspiration from Aids campaigners Act Up, she has become a champion of the opioid cause, forming the activist group Pain. We see “die-ins” and other attention-grabbing protests at institutions such as the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan museum and the V&A. That the Sackler name has now been reluctantly expunged from many of their walls is a testament to the tireless travails of Goldin and her gang.

Yet still she remains haunted, not least by memories of her sister Barbara, similarly abandoned by her parents and driven to take her own life at the age of 18. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the title taken from Barbara’s suicide note, serves as a kind of memorial but also as a reminder of what can be achieved by those who take pain and turn it into truth.

★★★★★

Festival continues to September 10, labiennale.org