Lourdes Portillo

Lourdes Portillo is a Mexican film director, focusing on Latin America and Latin American-born immigrants in the United States.

Biography
Lourdes Portillo receiving an award in Spain in 2015.

She is a writer, director, and producer of films from television documentary to satirical video-film collage. Portillo got her first filmmaking experience at the age of twenty-one when a friend in Hollywood asked her to help out on a documentary. Her formal training began several years later.[1] She has thus been making award-winning films about Latin American, Mexican, and Chicano/a experiences and social justice issues both as a director and screenwriter[2] for about forty years. Since her first film in 1979, After the Earthquake/ Despues del Terremoto, she has produced over 12 works that demonstrate her work as not only a director, but also an activist, artist, and journalist. While the majority of her work is in the documentary film genre, she has also created video installations and screen writings. Her films have been widely studied and analyzed, particularly by scholars in the field of Chicano studies.[3]

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."[4]

Personal life

Portillo was born in Mexico and raised in Los Angeles, California. She was first exposed to documentary filmmaking while working for an educational film company in Los Angeles.[5] 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. Afterward, she began her career as a producer and director of films. The political perspectives of her films have been described as "nuanced" and versed with a point of view balanced by her experience as a lesbian[6] and Chicana woman.[7]

Career

Portillo's films generally focus on Latin America and the experience of Latin American-born immigrants in the United States. Her film debut, 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 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. Las Madres received an Academy Award nomination in 1987 for Best Documentary.[8]

Other films have included Day of the Dead celebrations, Selena, the Female homicides in Ciudad Juárez, and AIDS (short film Sometimes My Feet Go Numb).

She has completed numerous collaborations such as 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.[9]

Portillo’s sixteen completed films include the Academy Award and Emmy Award nominated The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (1986), La Ofrenda: The Days of the Dead (1988), Columbus on Trial (1992), The Devil Never Sleeps (1994), Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena (1999), My McQueen (2004), Al Más Allá (2008), and her first animated film, State of Grace (2013). Her celebrated feature-length film, Señorita Extraviada (2001), a documentary about the disappearance and death of young women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, received a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, Best Documentary at the Havana International Film Festival, the Nestor Almendros Award at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, and the Ariel, the Mexican Academy of Film Award.[10]

Awards

Portillo and her films[11] have won numerous awards, mostly from regional film festivals.[12] Selected awards:

– Emmy Nomination, New and Documentary, 1986, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences
– Academy Award Nomination, Best Documentary, 1986, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
– Special Jury Prize, Sundance Film Festival, 1986, Park City, UT
– Gran Prix Ex-Aquo, Certamen Internacional de Cine Documental y Corto Metrage, 1986, Bilbao, Spain
– Coral Prize, Feature Documentary, Festival Internacional de Cine Latinoamericano, Havana, Cuba
– Blue Ribbon, American Film and Video Festival, New York, NY
– Second Place for Documentary, Sydney Film Festival, Sydney, Australia
– Golden Gate Award, San Francisco International Film Festival, San Francisco, CA
  • La Ofrenda: The Days of the Dead (1988)
– Blue Ribbon, American Film and Video Festival, 1990
– Outstanding Cinematic Achievement, Best of Category, Documentary Film, National Latino Film and Video Festival, 1991, New York NY
– Best Feature Documentary, Athens Film Festival, 1989, Athens, OH
  • Vida (1989)
– Cine Golden Eagle, 1990
– Special Mention, San Antonio CineFestival, 1990, San Antonio, TX
– Best Video, second place, Visual Artist Third Annual film and Video Festival, 1993, San Jose, CA
– Honorable Mention in Native American Studies, American Film and Video Association, Illinois
– The 1993 Whitney Museum Biennial, New York, New York
  • Mirrors of the Heart (1993)
– Silver Hugo, Chicago Film Festival, 1994, Chicago, IL
– Silver Apple, National Educational Film and Video Festival, 1994, Berkeley, CA
  • The Devil Never Sleeps (1994)
– Best Five Documentaries of the Year, Independent Documentary Association, 1996, Hollywood, CA
– Golden Gate Award, San Francisco International Film Festival, 1995, San Francisco, CA
– Best Documentary, San Antonio CineFestival, 1995, San Antonio, TX
– Best Documentary, Mostra International de Filmes de Dones, 1995, Barcelona, Spain
– New Directors / New Films, The Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1995, New York City
  • Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena (1999)
– Golden Spire, San Francisco International Film Festival, 1999, San Francisco, CA
  • Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, 1999[13]
  • Señorita Extraviada (2001)
– Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival
– Best Documentary at the Havana International Film Festival, the Nestor Almendros Award at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival
– the Ariel, the Mexican Academy of Film Award
  • Anonymous Was A Woman Award, 2016[14]

Filmography
  • After the Earthquake/Despues del Terremoto (1979)
  • 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)

See also

References
  1. "African American Women's Lives Then and Now". www.wmm.com. Retrieved February 26, 2020.
  2. "IDA Documentary Awards 2017 - Lourdes Portillo". International Documentary Association. September 12, 2017. Retrieved February 26, 2020.
  3. "Latino Film Index". Lourdes Portillo website. n.d. Archived from the original on June 27, 2007. Retrieved August 6, 2007.
  4. "Xochitl Productions". Lourdes Portillo website. n.d. Archived from the original on June 27, 2007. Retrieved August 6, 2007.
  5. Salas, Fred (October 29, 1998). "Interview with Lourdes Portillo". Lourdes Portillo website. Archived from the original on September 27, 2007. Retrieved August 6, 2007.
  6. Fregoso, Rosa Linda, ed. (2001). Lourdes Portillo: The Devil Never Sleeps and Other Films (1st ed.). University of Texas Press. p. 11. ISBN 978-0292725249.
  7. Avila, Robert (April 27, 2009). "SFIFF52: Lourdes Portillo, Persistence of Vision Award Recipient". SF360.org. San Francisco Film Society. Retrieved August 21, 2019.
  8. Fregoso, Rosa Linder (2001). Lourdes Portillo: The Devil Never Sleeps. University of Texas Press. p. 1.
  9. Portillo, Lourdes (2001). Chicano Matters: Lourdes Portillo: The Devil Never Sleeps and Other Films. University of Texas Press. p. 9 – via Proquest ebrary.
  10. "IDA Documentary Awards 2017 - Lourdes Portillo". International Documentary Association. September 12, 2017. Retrieved February 26, 2020.
  11. "Lourdes Portillo". BFI. Retrieved August 21, 2019.
  12. "About Lourdes: Awards". lourdesportillo.com. Retrieved March 11, 2017.
  13. "Lourdes Portillo". The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. 1999. Retrieved August 21, 2019.
  14. "2016 Award Winners". Anonymous Was A Woman. Archived from the original on March 6, 2017.

Further reading
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.