Lourdes Portillo

Lourdes Portillo (2015).

Lourdes Portillo (* 1944 in Chihuahua ) is an American film producer , director and screenwriter of Mexican origin . She mainly produces documentaries that focus on topics such as human rights , the fate of women and immigration .

Live and act

Lourdes Portillo was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, and when she was thirteen immigrated to the United States with her family, where she grew up in Los Angeles . Since Portillo was the only family member who spoke English through her schooling, she acted as a translator during this time. She was involved in the house purchase and placed her younger siblings in schools. She later described her role as a translator between cultures as the origin of her professional development. When Portillo was 21, a friend asked her to help produce a documentary , which sparked her interest in the genre. In 1970 Portillo moved to San Francisco , married and pregnant with their first son . In the following years she had two more sons. The marriage later ended in divorce. Until 1978 she studied at the San Francisco Art Institute . She trained with the National Association of Broadcast Engineers and Technicians and then worked as assistant to cameraman Stephen Lighthill on the filming of the drama Over-Under Sideways-Down (1977).

With the help of an Independent Filmmaker Award from the American Film Institute , Portillo financed her first film Después del terremoto (translated: After the earthquake ). She directed while Lighthill was behind the camera. The black and white short film is about an immigrant from Nicaragua who fled her homeland after the severe earthquake there in 1972 and lives in San Francisco. It premiered in June 1979 at the Krakowski Festiwal Filmowy and was awarded a certificate of honor.

In 1980 Portillo co-founded the organization Cine Acción , which operated within the San Francisco Bay Area and advocated Latin American cinema in the United States.

Portillo worked for three years with Susana Blaustein Muñoz on her next film, the documentary Las madres de la Plaza de Mayo (1985). It is about the Madres de Plaza de Mayo , an organization of Argentine women who demonstrated against the disappearance of their children during the Dirty War . Portillo and Muñoz were both producers, directors and screenwriters on the film. It was nominated for an Oscar and won 20 other awards.

After this success, the PBS financed the completion of the documentary La Ofrenda: The Days of the Dead , again a collaboration between Portillo and Muñoz. The film, whose title refers to the day of the dead , compares the festive rituals of Mexicans and Chicanos in San Francisco on this holiday. In 1992 Portillo produced the parody and video collage Columbus on Trial together with the comedy group Culture Clash . The short film ironically criticizes the American legal system and was shown in addition to film festivals at the Whitney Biennial .

In 1994 Portillo received a Guggenheim grant in recognition of her previous achievements as a filmmaker . In the same year her film El Diablo Nunca Duerme (translated: The devil never sleeps ) was released. The documentary is about Portillo's attempt to solve the death of her uncle in Chihuahua who was shot in the head. In addition to interviews with relatives, the film contains elements such as photographs, excerpts from soap operas and 8mm home videos. Portillo, who returned to her hometown for the first time in 15 years, not only addresses the personal circumstances of her family, but also the political culture in northern Mexico in the 1940s.

Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation , the Mexican Fine Arts Museum Center and other sponsors, Portillo produced a documentary in 1999 about the Latino singer Selena Quintanilla-Pérez , who was murdered at the age of 23 . Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena features interviews with family members, private videos and photos. In another documentary, Conversations with Intellectuals about Selena , five intellectuals discuss Selena's role model for other young women of Mexican descent.

In 2001 Portillo produced Señorita Extraviada , an award-winning documentary about the victims of the feminicide in Ciudad Juárez .

In June 2012, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City showed a retrospective of Portillo's work.

A collection of documents on Portillo's filmmaking from 1979 to 2001 is in the Stanford University Archives .

Awards (selection)

• 1985: Nomination for Gold Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival ( Las madres de la Plaza de Mayo )
• 1986 : Nomination for an Oscar in the category Best Documentary ( Las madres de la Plaza de Mayo )
• 1986: Nomination for the Grand Jury Prize , Sundance Film Festival ( Las madres de la Plaza de Mayo )
• 1989: Nomination for the Grand Jury Prize , Sundance Film Festival ( La Ofrenda )
• 1995: Nomination for the Grand Jury Prize , Sundance Film Festival ( El diablo nunca duerme )
• 2002: Gran Coral - First Prize Documentary and Memoria Documentary Award , International Festival of New Latin American Films ( Señorita extraviada )
• 2002: Special Jury Prize and nomination for the Grand Jury Prize , Sundance Film Festival ( Señorita extraviada )
• 2002: Néstor Almendros Human Rights Prize ( Señorita extraviada )

Filmography

• 1979: Después del terremoto
• 1985: Las madres de la Plaza de Mayo
• 1989: La ofrenda
• 1989: Vida
• 1992: Columbus on Trial
• 1994: El diablo nunca duerme
• 1996: Sometimes My Feet Go Numb
• 1999: Corpus
• 1999: Conversations with Intellectuals about Selena
• 2001: Señorita extraviada
• 2004: My McQueen
• 2008: Al más allá

literature

• Rosa Linda Fregoso, Lourdes Portillo: Lourdes Portillo: The devil never sleeps and other films. University of Texas Press, Austin 2001, ISBN 9780292725249 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Lourdes Portillo in the WorldCat bibliographic database
• Lourdes Portillo in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Lourdes Portillos homepage
• Biography and review of Lourdes Portillos films

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b c} Ian Aitken: The Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film. Routledge, New York 2011, ISBN 978-0-415-59642-8 , p. 733.
2. ↑ Rosa Linda Fregoso, Lourdes Portillo: Lourdes Portillo: The devil never sleeps and other films. P. 39.
3. ↑ Rosa Linda Fregoso, Lourdes Portillo: Lourdes Portillo: The devil never sleeps and other films. P. 59.
4. ↑ Biography lourdesportillo.com. Retrieved February 8, 2013.
5. ↑ Awards 1979 ( Memento of the original from March 3, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. krakowfilmfestival.pl. Retrieved February 8, 2013. 
6. ↑ ^{a b} Mónica López-González: Lourdes Portillo: La Cineasta Inquisitiva ( Memento of the original of December 24, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. cinespect.com, June 27, 2012. Retrieved February 8, 2013. 
7. ↑ Lourdes Portillo gf.org. Retrieved February 12, 2016.
8. ^ Lourdes Portillo: La Cineasta Inquisitiva moma.org. Retrieved February 8, 2013.
9. ^ Papers of Lourdes Portillo, 1979-2001 findingaids.stanford.edu. Retrieved February 8, 2013.