US director Laura Poitras poses with the Golden Lion for Best Film she received for 'All The Beauty And The Bloodshed' at the 79th Venice International Film Festival at Lido di Venezia in Venice, Italy on Sept 10. Photo: AFP
The win at the Venice Film Festival for All The Beauty And The Bloodshed represents a departure for documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, who has spent much of her career focused on post-9/11 America.
All the Beauty And The Bloodshed follows the art and activism of US photographer Nan Goldin - but is still deeply political.
Goldin led efforts to make the billionaire Sackler family - whose company manufactured and marketed addictive pain drug OxyContin - publically accountable for their role in the opioid crisis, which has killed over 500,000 people through overdoses.
"As a filmmaker who has done political work I have such respect for what Nan has chosen to do, to use her power and influence in the art world to demand accountability," Poitras told reporters in Venice last week.
Poitras was the first journalist to connect with Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency whistleblower.
She shared a 2014 Pulitzer Prize with The Guardian and Washington Post for the Snowden leaks, and her resulting film "Citizenfour" won an Academy Award the following year.
She followed that with 2016's Risk about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Other film work has centred on the US occupation of Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, while drone warfare and torture featured in a solo exhibit at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, Astro Noise.
Goldin did not attend Saturday's awards ceremony as she was preparing a new retrospective.
But she said at the premiere earlier in the festival that she was particularly proud of bringing down the Sacklers "in a time when billionaires have a different justice system than the rest of us and their total impunity in America." - AFP
