ON THIS PAGE:
- All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
- Argentina 85
ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED
Usa, 2022, Director Laura Poitras, With Nan Goldin, Durata 113′
In recent years, we have been talking and hearing more and more about so-called Big Pharma, the interests and scandals related to the large global pharmaceutical industry. Companies with billion-dollar turnovers that manage the production, marketing and distribution of drugs and medicines around the world, often the focus of conspiracy theories, just as frequently the subject of analysis and reconstructions, such as the one made by American Laura Poitras in her documentary in competition at Venice 79.
Winner of the category Oscar for 2015’s Citizenfour (and nominated for My Country, My Country in 2017), the documentary filmmaker has “deserved” the competition – in the words of Alberto Barbera – for “the portrait of an extraordinary artist, but also of the generation that built New York’s underground culture in the 1970s and 1980s” that is this “militant film.” A “groundbreaking artwork” different from the many previous ones on the subject – from The Medicine Seller starring Claudio Santamaria to the specific Disney+ Dopesick series, starring Michael Keaton and about the last years of renowned photographer Nan Goldin’s efforts against the Suckler family and Purdue Pharma, makers of OxyContin, the narcotic responsible for an addiction epidemic that claimed more than 400,000 lives in the US.
It is a thunderous and dramatic descent into the underworld whose narrative is intertwined with that of Goldin’s life and activism, whose photographs enrich the movie as well as presenting us with the stages of her dysfunctional suburban upbringing, from the loss of her teenage sister to her struggle with AIDS in the 1980s. She returns a compelling and thought-provoking work that bridges personal tragedy, political awareness and artistic expression.
ARGENTINA, 1985
Argentina, Usa, 2022, Director Santiago Mitre, With Ricardo Darín, Peter Lanzani, Alejandra Flechner, Norman Briski, Durata 140′
In 2011 he observed democracy, talking about the crisis of power and the habit of negotiating and gaining consensus among politicians in El Estudiante (Special Jury Prize – Cinema del Presente at Locarno). Today Santiago Mitre delves into the most shameful past of his nation’s History to return to the bloody military dictatorship that subjugated it from 1976 to 1983. Argentina, 1985, with which the Buenos Aires-based director faces this edition’s competition, is a political drama and the true story of lawyers Julio Strassera (Ricardo Darín) and Luis Moreno Ocampo (Peter Lanzani), who dared to investigate the “Junta Militar” to obtain justice and see the suffering of the many victims of those years recognized.
Four months of trial, with 833 eyewitnesses and survivors from the network of clandestine detention and torture centres recalling the fate of the more than 30,000 desaparecidos. A race against time, amid bombs and death threats, a battle between David and Goliath meticulously and passionately reconstructed and played by great actors. Amazon Studios wanted to bet on it for the first ‘Original’ film produced in Argentina. This is an important recognition for the 42-year-old screenwriter and director, among the “most interesting of the moment” in Argentina, as Alberto Barbera calls him, the first to sponsor this “film that needed to be made and that no one had yet dared to make.” Mitre shot in the same places where the events took place and with which – once again – he seeks to help his own generation and others to “come back to believe.”
