I was drawn to filmmaking because I never saw people like me – and stories like mine – on the screen. 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.

A storyboard during the making of Lourdes’ first film, after the earthquake (1979) Copyright: Lourdes Portillo

In the 1980s I entered a generation-defining community of San Francisco Bay Area filmmakers. While there was scant interaction between the camps of progressive social-issue documentarians who saw their work as an agent for change, and iconoclastic artists who had little patience for “informational films,” both were passionate about the possibilities inherent in the moving image.

As both an art school student and human rights advocate, I traveled 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. Their support and encouragement set me on a path that continues to this day.

Thus was born the ambition that carried me into adulthood: to learn how to make a film. With an intensity that is not uncommon among young immigrants escaping the traumas of adapting to a new life, I trained my focus on the Latin American diasporic experience…

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