Лурдес Портильо: жизнь и творчество мексиканского режиссера.

Mexican film director (1943–2024)

Lourdes Portillo (11 November 1943 – 20 April 2024) was a Mexican film director, producer, and writer. The political perspectives of Portillo's films have been described as "nuanced" and versed with a point of view balanced by her experience as a lesbian and Chicana woman. Portillo films have been widely studied and analyzed, particularly by scholars in the field of Chicano studies. 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. Portillo formal training began several years later. She had thus been making award winning films about Latin American, Mexican, and Chicano/a experiences and social justice issues both as a director and screenwriter for about forty years. Since Portillo first film in 1979, After the Earthquake (Después del Terremoto), she 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 also created video installations and screen writings.

Born on 11 November 1943 in Chihuahua, Mexico, Portillo's father's job as an administrator of a newspaper in Mexico and his work on printing projects in the U. S. were among the things that kindled Portillo's keen interest in stories. By the time she was in Portillo twenties, she had gotten a job working for an educational film company in Los Angeles, exposing her to her future career in documentary filmmaking. Wanting to work in a more livelier art film community, Portillo decided to move to San Francisco in the early 1970s. She began working as Stephen Lighthill's assistant in the collective's feature, Over Under, Sideways Down (1972).

Portillo's films generally focus on Latin America and the experience of Latin American–born immigrants in the United States. During her studies at the San Francisco Art Institute, she made her film debut Después del Terremoto in 1979 alongside codirector Nina Serrano, focusing on the experience of a Nicaraguan refugee of the 1972 Managua earthquake in San Francisco. Portillo's film audience greatly expanded beyond the U. S. and played a major role in publicizing internationally the plight of the mothers and missing children. Covering the mystery surrounding the death of her favorite uncle Oscar Ruiz Almeida, Portillo explored the countless dramas and rumors shared by her family members surrounding her uncle's life and death.