Laura Poitras on Nan Goldin and their film taking on the opioid crisis

Nan Goldin was surprised that Laura Poitras wanted to tell her story. Poitras was surprised to want to tell it. She, after all, is a documentary maker drawn to the hazardous edge of politics. Her best-known film, Citizenfour (2014), covered the case of Edward Snowden, the US intelligence contractor turned whistleblower. Risk (2016) dealt carefully with Julian Assange.

But Goldin is a photographer. Her louche, vérité self-portraits and studies of friends in the underground scene of 1980s New York made her a giant of modern American art. Still, as she herself told the press at last year’s Venice Film Festival, she held no state secrets.

Poitras too knew it was a curious fit. “I’m not a biographer,” she says, sipping water in a London hotel. “And there are already a lot of films about, you know, renowned people.”

Yet the film that brings the women together — Poitras’s stunning All the Beauty and the Bloodshed — makes perfect sense. Goldin is, in part, its subject. But it is also about the hundreds of thousands of Americans who count themselves victims of branches of the Sackler family. Among their members were the principal owners of Purdue Pharma, whose opioid OxyContin caused a national epidemic of addiction and overdose.

Goldin crossed paths with the Sacklers twice. Prescribed OxyContin after surgery in 2014, the next three years were lost to a grim dependency. She then realised that much of her work was held by museums that accepted funding from certain family members reported to be wholly aware of the addictive nature of the drug behind their fortune. Artwashing is one name for the practice. Poitras calls it “toxic philanthropy”.

“The Sacklers were directly responsible for a product with a terrible death toll,” Poitras says, “and all they ever thought was, ‘How do we sell more?’”. If her other films were about individuals in conflict with US power, here too, she decided, was a “uniquely American story — one about money buying status and impunity”.

The Sacklers were responsible for a product with a terrible death toll, and all they ever thought was, ‘How do we sell more?’

In response, Goldin co-founded activist group PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now). Bold, inventive protests were soon mounted against the Sacklers at world-leading museums with links to the family. “Die-ins” through 2018 and 2019 saw dozens of bodies lying prone in the splendour of the Guggenheim, Louvre and more. Red-stained “OxyDollars” fluttered in the air. Goldin’s presence guaranteed attention — an artist in the permanent collections of the same institutions she was rallying against.

The film has now been shortlisted for an Oscar. The giddy buzz of awards season sits awkwardly with Poitras. She hopes it keeps a spotlight on the Sacklers. “I’d like it to be productive,” she says.

Poitras and Goldin first met at a film festival in Portugal in 2014, the year Goldin was prescribed OxyContin. On the other side of her addiction, they met again to discuss documenting PAIN’s demands that museums cut ties with the Sacklers and remove the family’s name from the wings and galleries that bore them. Poitras “revered” Goldin. “I was trepidatious. I thought, all I can do is screw this up.”

But fear was widespread. Filming Goldin and her fellow activists before their die-ins, Poitras captured a palpable anxiety. “Nan was a nervous wreck. Everyone was. Who knew what was going to happen?” Security guards were just the first unknown. “The protests might have gone wrong in endless ways. The art world could have blacklisted her. And there was a lot of legal risk.” The Sacklers, Poitras says, were expert employers of lawyers and private investigators. “Their MO was aggression. Intimidation.”

She says she “assumes” that the family were represented in Venice when the film premiered there last September. But by then, on many levels, it was too late. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed documents PAIN’s far-reaching success. In the wake of the protests, a string of museums rejected Sackler donations. The name has now been scrubbed from places of honour. In late 2019, Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy, pending settlement of thousands of lawsuits. It was tempting to see it as a moral victory.

Goldin has chided Madeleine Sackler for ‘reputation-washing’ with her films about such issues as the US penal system

And since Venice the film has been hailed as a triumph, not just as a record of protest but a personal history too, after all. What Poitras planned as simple background interviews with Goldin became “intimate and alive”, uncovering a thread from the present back to a scarring childhood in 1960s suburban Boston, and on to the 1980s New York counterculture, where Aids laid waste to some of her soulmates.

Now, these multiple sides to the movie dovetail hauntingly. “The more Nan talked to me about the friends, lovers and colleagues she lost, the more I realised here were dual stories of generations dying. And they both pointed to societal failure.”

They pointed to the singular candour of Goldin as well, all the more extraordinary in an era when social media has enshrined the filtered public self. “Nan’s raw honesty was radical in the ’70s, and it still is,” Poitras says. It also informs her ongoing work with PAIN. Made explicit in the film is the fact that her recovery from OxyContin was achieved with clinical treatment. “Nan is adamant, as I am, that we have to destigmatise addiction. Shame doesn’t belong to people who need help. Shame belongs to the Sacklers.”

But moral victories can be complicated. Watching All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, it is hard not to be filled with boundless admiration for Goldin and troubled by what might have happened — or not — had PAIN been led by a less celebrated figure.

“Nan used her unique power in the art world very strategically,” Poitras says. “Without her, I’m pretty sure the names would all still be up.”

So how genuine has been the moral epiphany of our great museums about the Sacklers? Poitras is diplomatic. Their leadership, she says, at least came to the right side of history eventually. Still, she says, “some people do that when it’s a difficult choice, and some when the tide is already turning.”

A sense of only partial catharsis is summed up in Poitras’s film. As part of their bankruptcy deal, members of the Sackler family were obliged to listen in person to Goldin and others describe the ruinous legacy of OxyContin. The scene is wrenching; Poitras “teared up” filming. It also came at a price. The presence of three Sacklers on a Zoom call helped ensure legal immunity for 24 pages’ worth of trusts and associates. Before filing for the bankruptcy, family members had withdrawn more than $10bn from the company. “What this family is responsible for will ripple on for generations,” Poitras says now. “You think, ‘This is accountability?’”

Meanwhile, despite their exile from the museum world, the Sacklers remain active in the film business. Michael Sackler is a successful producer; Madeleine Sackler is another director of socially engaged documentaries. She has also been criticised for appearing reluctant to discuss the company co-owned by her late father Jonathan, while potentially having benefited financially from OxyContin.

Goldin has chided Sackler for what she considers “reputation-washing” through her films about such issues as the US penal system. After our interview, an email from Poitras expresses support for a crew member on Sackler’s next project, reported to have quit in unease. “I have great admiration for [them], though I know not everyone could do the same.”

An open, universal question is asked by All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. Exactly how dirty does money have to be to refuse it? The Sacklers, Poitras says, are a “monstrous” example of tainted finance. Ethically, though, how clean can anyone keep their hands in an opaque and profit-hungry system? “I don’t know that it’s possible,” she says. “Because none of us live outside power. But sometimes you still have to take a position.”

‘All the Beauty and the Bloodshed’ is in UK cinemas from January 27.

Danny Leigh is the FT’s chief film critic

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