the secret history of the sackler dynasty

Many of these institutions, like New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, had a Sackler Wing. But what she also learned is that the Sacklers were among the last half century’s most venerated art-world donors, giving millions and millions of dollars to the world’s most famous museums, in no small part to distract from their business practices by cultivating and polishing their image as philanthropists. have died of opioids addiction, but it wasn’t until Goldin herself became addicted to Ox圜ontin, in 2017, that she grasped the danger and learned about the multi-layered, calculating ways that Purdue Pharma had orchestrated the crisis for the sake of profit. The Sacklers, in effect, became narcotic drug lords with the cover of medical legality.

If you watch Alex Gibney’s four-hour HBO documentary “The Crime of the Century,” or read Patrick Radden Keefe’s “Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty” (Keefe is interviewed in Poitras’s film), you come to understand all the ways that the overprescribing of opioids, the intentionality of addicting people to them, was the cornerstone of the Sackler family’s business plan. Half of it is about Goldin’s life and work, and the other half is about the campaign she launched, beginning in 2018, against the Sackler family, the owners of Purdue Pharma, the drug company that created the opioids crisis.

“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” the fifth documentary feature directed by Laura Poitras (“Citizenfour,” “Risk”), is a portrait of Goldin, and a deft and satisfying one, though it’s not a conventional biography. They told the stories of the people in them, so the more you looked the more you saw. Her photographs, which she organized into slideshows like “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” seemed caught on the fly, but they were portraits. In fact, she had an extraordinary eye for composition. This, with 40 years’ hindsight, is telling, because what you see now is that Goldin was nothing less than a postpunk Diane Arbus, and that the deceptive “randomness” of her images pulsated with life, and was the key to their power and mystery.

The secret history of the sackler dynasty