Why you absolutely have to see this documentary on Nan Goldin

A fascinating film looks back on the fight led by photographer Nan Goldin against important patrons of the art world: the Sackler family, whom she holds responsible for a major health crisis.

You will not see it anymore, or less often, this name indicating that the Sackler family financed such and such a renovation of such a museum - we saw it at the Tate, the Louvre, the Guggenheim in New York, among other major cultural institutions. You had to be familiar with the mysteries of the pharmaceutical industry to know that it owes its fortune to its company Purdue Pharma, and in particular to the sale of opioids, including OxyContin , a formidable addictive painkiller, easily available, which wreaked havoc and caused thousands of deaths. According to statistics given by The Guardian in 2022 (December 4 edition), between 1999 and 2017, around 200,000 deaths were due to drug overdoses linked to the consumption of these products. A documentary traces the fight led by the photographer Nan Goldin , one of the most fundamental of her time, whose visceral series The ballad of sexual dependency (Editions Aperture, 2012) is one of the most extraordinary , singular, moving, in the history of contemporary photography , to put an end to this patronage disguising the sordid origin of their fortune. The interventions of family members solicited here are obscene with indifference, revolting with contempt. All the more heartbreaking is the distress call to emergency services made by a victim's father, heard in the film. If it is fascinating, it is because of its device, mixing its stubborn struggle, whose intimate springs are powerful (long drug addict, Goldin was sober before falling back into addiction to opioids, following an operation) and a return to her artistic journey, with intelligence , empathy , like these portraits that have made her an emblematic figure of photography . This delicate balance, between modesty and shamelessness, determination and fragility, can be seen as much as a tribute to the fight against injustice as that of a woman who will never give in to determinism to remain an irreducible artist .