American documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday for her film “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”, which highlights the career of photographer Nan Goldin, a figure in the underground new -yorker, and his fight against opiates in the United States.
At 58, the director from Boston won her second major prize, after the Oscar for best documentary for “Citizenfour” (2015), produced alongside whistleblower Edward Snowden.
“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” offers a journey through the life of Nan Goldin, a 68-year-old photographer known for her shots of the New York underground.
Nan Goldin has taken the lead in a fight against producers of opioid painkillers that have addicted and killed half a million Americans over the past two decades.
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The documentary returns to this at length: the photographer, having herself come close to death because of her addiction, put her notoriety at the service of the fight against the wealthy Sackler family which produced Oxycodone, while being a patron of the most prestigious international cultural institutions.
Few documentaries are selected for the main international film festivals, although this genre has shown great vitality in recent years.
In 2013, the Mostra had already rewarded a documentary, “Sacro GRA” by Gianfranco Rosi, around the ring road surrounding the city of Rome.
With MAP