l, and the centerpiece selection of this year’s New York Film Festival , it’s a documentary that straddles the then and the now, charting Goldin’s contemporary efforts to hold the Sacklers responsible for the opioid epidemic that’s killed more than 500,000 Americans, as well as detailing her long and winding personal and artistic road.
Worse, the Sacklers are billionaires whose name adorns dozens of international art museums, including some that feature Goldin’s own work—a fact that motivated Goldin to stage a 2018 protest at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Temple of Dendur wing that involved throwing pill bottles into the water and chanting “Sacklers lie! People die!”
Poitras juggles both of her narrative strands while simultaneously highlighting excerpts from Goldin’s signature shows, notably “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” an ever-changing series of images of the LGBTQ+ people with whom she coexisted.