Lourdes Portillo

Lourdes Portillo (born 1944) is a Mexican American screenwriter and filmmaker. While the majority of her work is in the documentary film genre, she has also created video installations and written for the stage. Her films have been much studied and analyzed, particularly by scholars in the field of Chicano studies.^[1]

She is a member of the production team of Xochitl Productions, which seeks to "inform the general population through varied endeavors that challenge dominant narratives."^[2]

Biography

Portillo was born in Mexico and raised in the United States. She was first exposed to documentary filmmaking while working for a company that made educational films in Los Angeles.^[3] She apprenticed with the National Association of Broadcast Engineers and Technicians in San Francisco, and graduated with an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1985. Thereafter she began her career as a producer and director.

Work

Portillo's films tend to focus on Latin America and the Latin American experience in the United States. Her film debut, for example, the 1979 Después del Terremoto, focuses on the experience of a Nicaraguan refugee of the 1972 Managua earthquake in San Francisco. It was followed by Madres: The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, a 1986 co-production with the Argentine director Susana Blaustein Muñoz which documented the actions of Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group of Argentine women who gather weekly at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires to remember their children that were murdered or "disappeared" by the military regime.

Other films have centered on Day of the Dead celebrations, Selena, the Female homicides in Ciudad Juárez, and AIDS.

She has also collaborated with the Chicano comedy troupe Culture Clash on two productions: Columbus on Trial and Culture Clash: Mission Magic Mystery Tour. She has also collaborated with the San Francisco Mime Troupe.

Portillo's work is influenced by radical cinema. Portillo and many artists of radical cinema focus on the combination of art and politics. These artists approach politics in art, but don't want art to suffer for its inclusion--they strive for a balance of the political and the artistic in their expression.^[4]

Awards

Portillo's films have won numerous awards, mostly from regional film festivals.^[5]

Filmography

• After the Earthquake (1979)
• Las Madres: The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (1986)
• La Ofrenda: The Days of the Dead (1988)
• Vida (1989)
• Columbus on Trial (1992)
• Mirrors of the Heart (1993)
• Sometimes my Feet go Numb (1994)
• The Devil Never Sleeps/El Diablo Nunca Duerme (1994)
• This is Your Day/Hoy es tu Día (1998)
• Corpus: A Home Movie About Selena (1999)
• Conversations With Intellectuals About Selena (1999)
• Culture Clash: Mission Magic Mystery Tour (2001)
• Señorita Extraviada/Missing Young Woman (2001)
• My McQueen (2004)

References

Further reading

• Rosa Linda Fregoso; Lourdes Portillo (2001). Lourdes Portillo: The Devil Never Sleeps and Other Films:. Austin: University of Texas Press. ISBN 978-0-292-72525-6. 

• Vivancos Perez, Ricardo F. Radical Chicana Poetics. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
• Vivancos Pérez, Ricardo F. "Parallax Views on Human Rights: Portillo’s Experiment Al más allá” Global Studies Review 8.3 (Fall/Winter 2013).

External links

• Official site
• Lourdes Portillo in the Video Data Bank
• Lourdes Portillo at the Internet Movie Database
• Works by or about Lourdes Portillo in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Lourdes Portillo in the Women Make Movies catalog
• Lourdes Portillo retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, June 22–30.