Influential documentary filmmaker Lourdes Portillo, who used her art as social activism to illuminate the struggles of the working class, has died.
The Mexico native, who made “The Devil Never Sleeps” in 1994 and received an Oscar nomination for her 1985 film, “The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo,” died Saturday morning at her home in San Francisco, according to her friend. and the filmmaker Soco Aguilar, too.
For the record:
10:40 am April 23, 2024An earlier version of this article said Lourdes Portillo died of pancreatic cancer. The filmmaker was diagnosed with cholangiocarcinoma, also known as bile duct cancer.
Portillo, who had been diagnosed with cholangiocarcinoma, also known as bile duct cancer, was 80 years old.
“She was a pioneer, even until the last minute,” Aguilar said in an interview. “She was very strong, she was a warrior, and she was completely at peace and happy for everything she had done in her life.”
Last year, the Academy Motion Picture Museum honored Portillo with a retrospective and gallery to celebrate his life and groundbreaking career. Portillo focused primarily on issues affecting women in her native Mexico and beyond. In “The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo,” she exalted the cause of a group of Argentine women who met periodically in a square in Buenos Aires to remember the children who disappeared during that country's political struggle in the late 1970s and early eighties.
“The Devil Never Sleeps” was about the mysterious murder of his uncle, Oscar Ruiz Almeida, in his home state of Chihuahua.
His documentaries sometimes took the form of journalism. At times, his work was controversial.
Among his films are “The Days of the Dead” (1989); “Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena” (1999), about the life and legacy of murdered Tejano singer Selena Quintanilla; and “Señorita Extraviada” (2001), a documentary about the disappearance of young women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, a film that was honored with a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
He had been working on a final project with performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña in San Francisco.
Portillo was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, in 1943.
Starting in third grade, her parents sent her across the border to the United States to attend a Catholic school. When she was a teenager, her family moved to Los Angeles. She started in the world of cinema at the age of 21, when a friend of hers asked her for help with a documentary.
“The reality of living in the United States as an immigrant is very painful, because the first thing that happens to you is that you realize that everyone is trying to crush your sense of 'I can do it,'” Portillo told the Academy Museum in a speech. interview last year. “Your feeling of being really important in this society, of having something to say. You are already diminished.”
He moved to San Francisco in the 1970s, where he joined that city's thriving arts community. She landed a job as a first camera assistant while being part of a collective called Cine Manifest. In 1978 he graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute.
“That was the beginning of thinking that I could make movies that could really motivate people to do something that would be good for everyone,” he said during the interview at the Academy Museum.
With funding from the American Film Institute Independent Filmmaker Award, he made the short documentary “After the Earthquake,” about a Nicaraguan refugee in San Francisco, which was followed by his most notable films.
“She was strong and knew what she wanted to say… speaking out of difficult situations with such artistry,” Aguilar said. “She was an activist because of the way she made her films, and that made her extraordinary. She was ahead of her time.”
He is survived by three children, four brothers, five grandchildren and extended family in the United States and Mexico.
