“Beauty and pain”
Director: Laura Poitras
Premiere: 3/9/23
Punctuation: * * * *
One of the many good decisions Laura Poitras makes in this documentary wins out: to tell the story with the deepest humanity, without allowing the wide variety of topics she covers to impose itself on her protagonists (many indeed) and their personal stories. many of them). A documentary like the sharp and poignant La belleza y el dolor, but with generosity, empathy and The need to dig deep to understand things and be able to talk about them.
What they have in common is the activism of artist Nan Goldin, a counterculture photographer in New York between the late ’70s and ’80s. Sackler pharmaceutical dynastyis responsible for marketing an opioid (OxyContin) that has caused more than half a million deaths in the United States. Poitras follows the actions of Goldin and other activists to call on major museums and galleries to withdraw their cooperation with the Sacklers, guardians of the American cultural scene.
Based on these actions, he follows two paths. On the one hand, he paints a profile of Goldin (precise, well-documented, told through his work). Personal history and employment document, among other things, The rights of the LGBT community, the AIDS epidemic and the stigma of mental illness. On the other hand, Poitras clearly explains the opioid crisis in the United States. Up to a point, both paths seem to run parallel. But it is not. Goldin’s intimacy and the people he met, lived with, and photographed, and his history of the opioid crisis speak of the same thing: How does power destroy everything? but, especially, with the most vulnerable.