“Sacklers lie, people die!”. The activist group PAIN was born in 2017 in order to denounce the havoc and dramatic consequences of the drug in the population Oxycontin, an opioid used for medical purposes but with side effects such as addictions and dependencies, in addition to half a million deaths. The Sackler family, which had become rich in part thanks to the commercialization of this medicine, was then a dynasty that was among the great cultural philanthropists and that gave its name to some of the most famous rooms in the best museums in the world, until this organization, led by the artist Nan Goldin, managed to reverse the social order to make them unwanted and outcasts of their own habitat.
Documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras takes this excuse as the start of her film beauty and painwinner of the Golden Lion in the last edition of the venice festival and one of the firm candidates to win the Oscar for best documentarya statuette that he already achieved in the past with his documentary citizenfour (2014), about Edward Snowden and the illegal surveillance programs of the American intelligence agency. The film arrives in Spanish cinemas just two days before the most important audiovisual ceremony, and after having won the award for best documentary at the Independent Spirit Awards just two days ago.
It is difficult to define this documentary. It is the story of activism, but also a chronicle of the flourishing of the transvestite movement in New York, of the effervescence of art in the 70s and 80s, street nihilism, the tragedy of AIDS or the power of men over women. At the same time, and beyond collecting the testimony of a survivor, witness and protagonist of the counterculture scenealso works as an exercise around memory, memories and experiences.
beauty and pain It is a powerful documentary because the weight of what Laura Poitras narrates is supported almost entirely by a succession of photographs by Nan Goldin
Goldin (Washington DC, 1953) underwent a transcendental change the day he his teenage sister passed away. Her parents insisted on hiding the real motive, suicide, and that early escape was the starting point of the rebellion of the artist, who went from house to house after the doctors warned her parents about a similar future for her. This film reviews everything that followed, from the motives behind her artistic impulses to the nerve to take one of the world’s most powerful dynasties to court.
beauty and pain It is a powerful documentary because the weight of what Laura Poitras narrates is supported almost entirely by a succession of photographs by Nan Goldin, those that became a fresh and innovative look at the hectic moment of which it was witness and protagonist between the 70s and the 80sas well as a few more recent video images of the actions in museums such as the MET in New York or the Louvre to get the name of the Sacklers removed from the rooms.
These simultaneous narrations, all the fruit of the Nan Goldin’s trauma in which the film delves deeper, they run the risk of turning this documentary into a disjointed, imprecise and even diffuse film, but its director manages to find the emotional connections, a common thread in the artist’s life that gives meaning to her actions, artistic and vital, as if it were an epic.
At the end of the film, one has the feeling that Laura Poitras has not left any question unanswered and, at the same time, has managed to present all the mysteries of life in the most cinematographic way possible. Although the Oscar for best documentary is not usually very important, it is likely that this time it will not go unnoticed.
