life-affirming as in "life goes on." more than a document or a portrait, this film is a guidebook on how a certain kind of person should live. "a certain kind of person"...goldin is the mold, she broke it–whatever. goldin made art out of her life decades before the internet disciplined a generation to make product out of ours. goldin wore her traumas like so many buttons and badges before it was fashionable, or terribly profitable. she ratified–ratifies–the beauty of transsexuals, junkies, whores, fags, and dykes because she saw it–sees it–not because she thought it or thinks it. we know this song: one moves to new york, renames herself, puts some funky chemicals in her body, chooses a new family, starts…

The political act of making private life and pain into a public, visual work of persuasion and rebellion as documented in the life of legendary photographer Nan Goldin, whose own life experience as an addict and queer feminist outsider artist has given her a front-row seat to beautiful, defiant people from all walks of life in deliberately horrible, destitute circumstances that the powerful have yet to answer for. Obviously you go into something like this hoping to see a wonderful old woman look into the camera and say “when we eventually abolish the prison system the Sackler family should be the last ones out” (and the documentation in here of the activism itself appropriately alternates between cathartic and gut-wrenching), but there’s…

Anyone who says this lacks focus because it should've been about Nan Goldin's artwork or her activism vs the Sacklers in the art world doesn't understand the through line. And the through line is something that Covid shattered for many people. That is a sense of community. Her artwork captures her community of artists and counterculture misfits of queers, punks, and sex workers. Her activism captures her new community of organizers against opiods and blind greed. It is a beautiful shift. And its something I've personally been struggling with—not opiods—but this looking back at the community I'd been in in my youth through the local music scene and the beautiful and rambunctious artists that moved through it. Then my community…