About the Director

„Laura Poitras (* February 2, 1964 in Boston) is a U.S. American documentary director and producer. She has published several awarded works and is a MacArthur Fellow. Poitras is one of the initiators of the Freedom of the Press Foundation; next to Glenn Greenwald she was the first person to have access to the documents which were provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden in the context of the global surveillance and espionage affair. From February 2014 until September 2016 she worked for the medium The Intercept, which had been founded by Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill together with her. Her film Citizenfour, a documentary about the U.S. American whistleblower Edward Snowden, which was edited and directed by her, won the Academy Award as best documentary in 2015. (Wikipedia)

Press Reviews

„All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is a complex film, that makes documentary, portrait, essay, and art melt into one another.“ (Maria Wiesner, FAZ)

The Director About the Film

„I began working on this film with Nan in 2019, two years after she decided to leverage her power as an artist to expose the billionaire Sackler family’s criminal culpability in fueling the overdose crisis. The process of making this film was deeply intimate. Nan and I met on weekends in her living room and talked. I was first drawn to the present-day horror story of a billionaire family knowingly creating an epidemic, and then funnelling money into museums in exchange for tax write-offs and naming galleries. But as we talked, I realised this was only one part of the story I wanted to tell, and that the core of the film is Nan’s art, photography, and the legacies of her friends and sister Barbara. A legacy of people escaping America.“ Laura Poitras on the occasion of the Biennale da Venecia