The Top 10 Art Documentaries you need to see

From an artist's fight to remove the Sackler name to the photographer nanny discovered after her death.

Hello readers! It’s film season, so what better way to kick off the week than to have a look at some of the best art documentaries around? From a movie that follows an artist who transforms garbage into art to another about a nanny who turned out to be one of the 20th century’s greatest photographers. This is part of my new series for paid subscribers. Want in? Sign up now. Let’s have a look!

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1. All The Beauty And The Bloodshed (2022)

Laura Poitras’s poignant Oscar-nominated documentary follows the artist Nan Goldin and her fight to take down the Sackler name from museums worldwide – and challenge the family profiting from the opioid crisis, which so far has killed half a million people.

Running parallel to the story of the disgraced Sacklers – expertly commentated by Patrick Radden Keefe, whose New Yorker article and book explores the family’s rise and fall – is the story of Goldin’s life.

The youngest of four children, Goldin was eleven when her older sister, Barbara, committed suicide. (Goldin has since dedicated much of her work to her late sister, writing: “I don’t ever want to lose the real memory of anyone again”.) Leaving home, living in foster homes, the ‘shy’ Goldin picked up the camera, which became her first way of talking. She photographed nights out and the glamour of Boston’s drag queens. In the 1970s she headed to NYC, took her camera everywhere, and photographed her community throughout the AIDS epidemic that was viciously silenced by Ronald Raegan.

A favourite quote from the film was: “Nan photographs from the other side". This is such an accurate description of her work. It embodies how she allows us to connect with her subjects so deeply; her empathy, connection, compassion and non-judgemental lens.

Before watching, I didn’t realise the extent of how Goldin's work (both art and life) has consistently given voice to unheard communities, such as the exhibition she organised around AIDS in 1989.

All The Beauty And The Bloodshed is painful, heartbreaking, beautiful and joyous. The ways Sackler Pain have tirelessly campaigned over the years is executed with such vision. From the snowflakes of prescription sheets that fall from the top of the Guggenheim:

…to the orange pill boxes thrown into the Metropolitan’s pond that echo a constellation of stars: