Nan Goldin and Laura Poitras: two artists, a devastating film

Artist Nan Goldin did not consider herself worthy enough to have director Laura Poitras make a documentary about her.

Poitras won an Oscar in 2015 for "Citizenfour," about Edward Snowden, and was placed on a federal watch list after her 2006 Iraq war film "My Country, My Country." Goldin remembers thinking, "I don't have any state secrets" and "I don't fight the machine the same way as everyone else it worked on."

Poitras was also intimidated by Goldin. The photographer, who published her radical first collection, "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency," in 1986, has chronicled her own life for decades in daringly intimate portraits of her friends, lovers, and herself. "I was kind of like, I don't know if I'm cut out for this," Poitras said. "What can I bring here?"

Together, however, they emerged with "All Beauty and Bloodshed", which has won the prestigious Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in September. The festival's top prize is a rarity for a documentary that exists itself outside the conventions of its genre.

Both a chronicle of Goldin's activism in the face of to the opioid crisis and a full account of his artistic and political emergence, the film, in theaters November 23, juxtaposes excerpts from his anti-taboo image slideshows with footage from his protests with his group Prescription Addiction Intervention Now, or P.A.I.N. They fought against the outsized influence that members of the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, makers of OxyContin, had over the fine art world. "All the Beauty" deals with profound loss - including the suicide of Goldin's older sister - while showing the power of community action. The result is an experience that is both painfully sad and invigorating.

ImageAfter discovering the work of the P.A.I.N. by Goldin. was doing, Laura Poitras said: "It just kept clicking...