All The Beauty and The Bloodshed

Free, booking essential 
Film duration: 1h 57m
R18+
This screening is restricted to adults 18 years and older and proof of age may be requested.  

An epic, emotional and interconnected story about internationally renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin told through her slideshows, intimate interviews, ground-breaking photography, and rare footage of her personal fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the opioid crisis.

Directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras, the film interweaves Goldin’s past and present. From P.A.I.N.’s (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) actions at renowned art institutions to Goldin’s photography of her friends and peers through her epic work The ballad of sexual dependency and her legendary 1989, US National Endowment for the Arts-censored AIDS exhibition, Witness: Against Our Vanishing, the film is deeply personal and urgently political.

Recently acquired by the National Gallery, The ballad of sexual dependency, is Goldin’s extended photographic study of her chosen family – her ‘tribe.’ The work began life as a slide show screened in the clubs and bars of New York where Goldin and her friends worked and played. The slide show was then distilled to a series of 126 photographs which are on display in Gallery 26 (Level 2) from the 8 July to 28 January 2024.

Join Anne O’Hehir (Curator, Photography) for a floor talk in the exhibition before the screening. Free, booking essential.

Saturday Screenings is a free program of film screenings presented in partnership between the National Gallery of Australia and National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.