Photo by: Nic Paget-Clarke
Lourdes Portillo
LATEST NEWS & EVENTS
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Photo by: Nic Paget-Clarke
LATEST NEWS & EVENTS
In this recent interview with Bedatri D. Choudhury for Sundance Institute as part of a larger piece called “Back to the ’80s: Women Documentary Filmmakers Remember the Festival’s First Decade,” Lourdes Portillo reflects on her first experiences with Sundance Film Festival in the 1980’s, and her social justice-motivated filmmaking.
“Filmmaker Bernardo Ruiz recently spoke with the iconic Mexican-American filmmaker Lourdes Portillo about her groundbreaking films, Las Madres: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (1985) and Señorita Extraviada (Missing Young Woman) (2001). Ruiz’s documentary El Equipo (2023) chronicles the history of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team and is currently streaming on pbs.org through Independent Lens until January 7, 2024.”
Writer Eva Recinos interviews Lourdes Portillo about her Academy Museum of Motion Pictures vignette, Significant Movies and Moviemakers: Lourdes Portillo, on display February 2023 - January 2025, Lourdes’ career which spans 40 years of film history, and the intentions behind her work.
In this special hometown screening at the Clarion Performing Arts Center in San Francisco’s historic Chinatown, two of Lourdes’ classic films will be shown: Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena and Columbus on Trial, with a possible special appearance by Lourdes after the screening.
The Devil Never Sleeps/El Diablo Nunca Duerme will be featured in the Documental Ambulante Film Festival in Mexico, with screenings in 3 cities: Ciudad de México, Ciudad Juarez and Morelia, and streaming on MUBI for Mexican audiences only throughout the festival. This important retrospective includes 11 films created by female filmmakers from Mexico, including: Lourdes Portillo, Natalia Almada, Angela Reginato, Christiane Burkhard, Viviana García Besné, Gabriela Ruvalcaba, Natalia Bruschtein, Monica Hopf, Nicolasa Ruiz, Daniela Silva Solórzano and Eva Villaseñor.
“The celebrated Chihuahua-born Chicana documentarian Lourdes Portillo, who plowed Mexican telenovelas of the early 1990s in recounting the drama surrounding her Uncle Oscar’s death in her 1994 film The Devil Never Sleeps, recalled to me her own early experiences: not of watching a telenovela but rather of listening to a radionovela version of Wuthering Heights (Cumbres Borrascosas) with her grandmother in Chihuahua. (Mexican telenovelas have their origins in listening, specifically in Cuban radionovelas of the 1940s, most notably El derecho de nacer by Félix B. Caignet.)…”
—Excerpt from “Errant Telenovelas,” by Byron Davies, The Baffler, June 2023
“I find it very satisfying to try to have beauty be a part of protest.”
“I feel that cinema is a great tool…I’m passionate about art. I like making films that kind of break barriers, that express things that haven’t been expressed.”
- Lourdes Portillo
An interview with Lourdes and her film screening series at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures May 12-21 is featured in a new article in La Opinión daily newspaper, “Lourdes Portillo muestra su corazón en sus películas,” by reporter Victoria Infante.
A screening series of select films directed by Lourdes Portillo will take place May 12-21 at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, in conjunction with the gallery vignette “Significant Movies and Moviemakers: Lourdes Portillo," on display February 2023 - January 2025 (info about gallery HERE).
Films to be screened include: After the Earthquake (1979), Las Madres: The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (1985), La Ofrenda: The Days of the Dead (1988), Vida (1989), The Devil Never Sleeps (1994), Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena (1999), A Conversation with Academics about Selena (1999) and Señorita Extraviada (Missing Young Woman) (2001). Featuring an appearance by Lourdes Portillo at a select screening (more info coming soon...).