NEON Takes Laura Poitras Documentary ‘All The Beauty And The Bloodshed’

On an abnormally hot summer day in Oslo, a strange electric field surrounds the city as a collective migraine spreads across town. TVs, lightbulbs, and electronics go haywire, the chaos reaching a debilitating crescendo when suddenly, it’s over.

Neon has acquired North American and UK rights to the horror-drama Handling the Undead, marking the narrative feature debut of Thea Hvistendahl, who previously directed the documentary Adjø Montebello and several short films, including the SXSW Grand Jury Award-nominated Virgins4lyfe. The project reteams the distributor with Renate Reinsve and Anders Danielsen Lie, who starred in its Oscar-nominated romantic drama The Worst Person in the World, directed by Joachim Trier.

“Photography was always a way to walk through fear,” says Nan Goldin in her raspy voice as photos fill the screen. Nuzzled within the textures of the snapshots live friends, lovers, and drifters, all eternally preserved through the eyes of the consecrated artist who rose to prominence in the 80s thanks to her visual chronicling of queer life and culture in New York at the height of the AIDS epidemic.

The scourge of the opioid crisis has been documented in the press and in government reports; the culpability of the Sacklers, the multi-billionaire pharmaceutical family whose former company Purdue made the painkiller Oxycontin, has been successfully dramatized. The Sacklers are everywhere in Laura Poitras’ gripping documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, but they are supporting players.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” the photographer Nan Goldin tells a woeful, revealing, and in its way rather funny anecdote about how in the 1980s, when she first gathered up her photographs — casually transgressive images of her and her friends, who were often drag queens and addicts, along with shots of the assorted other people and situations she experienced as part of the hummingly squalid East Village New York subculture — and tried to shop them around to galleries and museums, they were roundly rejected, because the arbiters of taste, who were inevitably men, favored photographs that were black-and-white and composed in elegant meticulous ways. Goldin’s photographs were in garish verité color, set in environments that were so scruffy (messy bohemian apartments, ordinary people just lolling around) that it looked, to the gallery mavens, like there was no visual organization to them, no art.

Neon in association with National Geographic Documentary Films said director Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love will cross $1 million at the box office this weekend, becoming the biggest documentary release of the year for combined domestic and international gross. The film opened this summer and is entering its ninth week in theaters nationally. It will stream on Disney+ later this year.

Idris Elba is speaking out.

Zack Sharf The upcoming Whitney Houston biopic “I Wanna Dance Somebody” stars BAFTA-winning actor Naomi Ackie as the legendary singer, which means the debate over Black British actors taking roles away from American actors is bound to resurface. The debate surged in 2017 after Samuel L. Jackson called out Daniel Kaluuya’s casting in “Get Out,” for which the actor earned an Oscar nomination. “I tend to wonder what that movie would have been with an American brother who really feels that,” Jackson said. In a new interview on “The Shop” (via The Root), Idris Elba railed against the claim that Black British actors are takes roles away from American actors. Naomi Ackie’s role in “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” served as a launching pad for the discussion. Talk show host Maverick Carter asked Elba about Ackie’s casting, noting that Black American women might criticize a Black British actor playing an American icon.

In Dana Walden’s first personnel move since being upped to Chairman of Disney General Entertainment three months ago, Walden has promoted three executives: Eric Schrier, who is taking on a new, larger role, as well as Craig Erwich and Shannon Ryan who are expanding their current responsibilities.

Manori Ravindran International Editor Utopia has acquired Participant Media’s feature documentary “Unseen Skies,” which the U.S. distributor will release on Sept. 13. Directed by award-winning filmmaker Yaara Bou Melhem, “Unseen Skies” explores the evolution of state and corporate surveillance. The film follows American artist and geographer Trevor Paglen as he launches an artwork called “Orbital Reflector” into space, visible with the naked eye from Earth, to highlight the global impact of technology in the modern world. Having achieved international notoriety for his conceptual art, which fuses photography and large-scale multidisciplinary events, Paglen’s work reveals the largely unseen power structures of technology and surveillance that shape, impact and increasingly define the framework of our lives.

Neon has acquired the U.S. distribution rights to Park Chan-wook’s award-winning title Oldboy. Neon is planning a theatrical release in celebration of the pic’s 20th anniversary.

Michaela Zee editor DCTV’s new documentary-dedicated theater, “Firehouse: DCTV’s Cinema for Documentary Film,” will open its doors Sept. 23. Located in DCTV’s historic Chinatown firehouse building in New York, the nonprofit theater will begin its opening week with an exclusive screening of Abigail Disney and Kathleen Hughes’ “The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales.” “I’m so excited that my new documentary, ‘The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales,’ will kick off the opening of DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema,” Disney said in a statement. “I can’t wait to meet the first audiences who will be enjoying and shaping this vital new addition to New York City’s arthouse film scene.”

Altitude has boarded international sales and UK and Irish distribution on Oscar-winning documentarian Laura Poitras’s Nan Goldin bio-pic All The Beauty And The Bloodshed, ahead of its world premiere at Venice and North American debut at Toronto.

Naman Ramachandran Altitude is handling international sales and U.K. and Irish distribution for Laura Poitras’ documentary about artist and activist Nan Goldin, “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.”The film is scheduled to make its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, where it will compete for the Golden Lion, an opportunity rarely accorded to non-fiction titles.

Brent Lang Executive Editor of Film and Media“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” Laura Poitras’s new documentary about artist and activist Nan Goldin, has sold to Neon. The indie studio acquired the film before it was scheduled to make its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. It has also landed prominent spots at the Toronto Film Festival and the New York Film Festival, where it will get the centerpiece slot.

The documentary follows artist and activist Nan Goldin told through her slideshows, intimate interviews, photography and rare footage of her fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the opioid overdose crisis. It will premiere in competition for the Golden Lion at Venice.

EXCLUSIVE: Julie Baldassi of Younger Daughter Films and Brian Robertson of Low End announce Britt Lower (Severance), Tom Mercier (We Are Who We Are), Jean Yoon (Kim’s Convenience) and Sook-Yin Lee (Shortbus) will star in the drama/thriller/romance The Incident Report.

tiff.net.The full list of new additions:TIFF DOCS“752 Is Not a Number,” Babak Payami | Canada“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” Laura Poitras | USA“Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On,” Madison Thomas | Canada“Casa Susanna,” Sébastien Lifshitz | France, USA“Ciné-Guerrillas: Scenes from the Labudovic Reels,” Mila Turajlic | Serbia, France, Croatia, Montenegro“The Colour of Ink,” Brian D.

We are less than a month away from the beginning of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. So, as we get closer to the Opening Night festivities, TIFF is beginning to lock down its final list of films that will screen at the event.