Lourdes Portillo, Oscar-nominated documentarian, dead at 80
Lourdes Portillo, the Mexican independent filmmaker behind The Devil Never Sleeps, has died at the age of 80.
During her prolific career, Portillo worked on many acclaimed documentaries that won several coveted awards. She also earned a ‘Best Documentary Feature’ nomination at the Academy Awards for her second film, The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo.
Portillo co-directed the film alongside Susana Blaustein Muñoz, focusing on a group of women who regularly met up following the murders of their sons. Explorations of social issues in Latin America came to define much of Portillo’s work, which she thoroughly dissected with complexity.
The filmmaker moved to Los Angeles from Mexico as a teenager, getting her first taste of filmmaking when one of her friends asked her to assist with a documentary when she was 21-years-old.
She joined a Marxist filmmaking collective, Cine Manifest, in the early 1970s, where she gained vital early experience behind the camera. Then, Portillo started studying filmmaking, eventually releasing her debut film, After the Earthquake, co-directed by Nina Serrano, which was a fictional short heavily based on reality.
In the coming decades, Portillo made many experimental and compelling documentaries, from La Ofrenda: The Days of the Dead to Corpus: A Home Movie About Selena, Señorita Extraviada and, most recently, State of Grace.
On her website, Portillo previously explained why she decided to become a filmmaker. She wrote: “I was drawn to filmmaking because I never saw people like me – and stories like mine – on the screen.”
The director added, “I was born in Mexico and immigrated to the United States as a teenager. My filmmaking expedition began when I was an art school student in San Francisco in the late 1970s.”
Portillo described herself as a “human rights advocate,” explaining that she “travelled freely between the documentary and experimental film communities, often crewing on their projects while continuing to test the boundaries of nonfiction storytelling in my own work.”
One of Portillo’s most successful movies was The Devil Never Sleeps, which saw her investigate her uncle’s death after she comes to realise that the circumstances surrounding his passing were rather strange. Tracing experiences from his life, she considered if he could’ve actually been murdered.
Before Portillo’s death, she was planning a new documentary entitled Looking At Ourselves.
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