Considerada una chicana más, porque nace en Chihuahua, México, pero ha pasado casi toda la vida en EE.UU. Desde 1985, Lourdes Portillo ha producido más de 20 filmes y vídeos, desde documentales hasta montajes experimentales en este último soporte. Entre sus producciones se cuenta el documental preseleccionado para los Óscars de la Academia, producido y dirigido por Lourdes Portillo y Susana Muñoz: Las madres de la Plaza de Mayo. Es el primer documental en forma de crónica de la lucha por la justicia de las madres de los desaparecidos durante la dictadura argentina entre los años 70 y 80.
La ofrenda (producida igualmente en colaboración con Susana Muñoz), sigue las huellas de la fiesta del Día de Todos los Santos en México y en EE.UU.. Columbus on Trial es una sátira experimental de Cristóbal Colón y el Quinto Centenario, con el grupo de teatro latino Culture Clash. En 1996 produjo y dirigió el documental experimental aclamado por la crítica El diablo nunca muere, que trata los amores y odios de una familia mexicana. En 1997 produjo y dirigió Corpus. Su último documental es Señorita Extraviada, que narra la historia de más de 300 mujeres asesinadas en Ciudad Juárez, México. Su obra experimental y su influencia en el mundo del Cine Independiente es de importancia considerable.
Lourdes Portillo se dedica a la creación de filmes y vídeos que documentan y exploran en el mundo de la experiencia latina/chicana en la América actual. Siempre ha pretendido, de diferentes maneras, informar, promover y propagar el diálogo en lo que respecta a los asuntos y la identidad latina ante la población general, concretamente ante las comunidades latina y chicana. También ha pretendido experimentar con los límites de la forma documental, ampliándolos, característica por la que se le identifica.
Sus filmes se han proyectado en numerosas salas y en festivales del mundo entero como Sundance, Venecia, La Habana, Toronto, Bilbao, New Directors, Munich, Hong Kong, Creteil, Londres, Madrid, Valladolid, Mexico City, Guadalajara, Buenos Aires, Sao Paolo y muchos más, y en escuelas, y museos. Ha recibido un mínimo de 30 premios internacionales en reconocimiento a su obra.
Mexico-born and Chicana identified, Portillo's films have focused on the search for Latino identity. She has worked in a richly varied range of forms, 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. Portillo says: " I knew from that moment what I was going to do for the rest of my life. That never changed. It was just a matter of when I was going to do it." Her formal training began several years later. An apprenticeship at the San Francisco NABET (National Association of Broadcast Engineers and Technicians) led to a job as Stephen Lighthill's first camera assistant on Cine Manifest's feature Over, Under, Sideways, Down. In 1978, after graduating from The San Francisco Art Institute, Portillo used American Film Institute Independent Filmmaker Award monies to create her internationally praised narrative film After the Earthquake/Despues del Terremoto, about a Nicaraguan refugee living in San Francisco.
The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, the result of a three year collaboration with writer/director Susana Munoz, was a pivotal film in Portillo's career. Its nomination for the Academy's Best Documentary in 1985, and the twenty other awards it received internationally earned Portillo the PBS funding she needed for her next film, La Ofrenda :The Days of the Dead. Completed in 1989 and greeted with widespread critical acclaim, La Ofrenda was Portillo's most serious attempt to date to challenge the notion that as she says "documentary is always associated with injustice." In it she portrays in loving color a Mexican and Chicano holiday - the celebration of "the days of the dead" - and initiates the dream-like structure that has become a hallmark of her recent work.
A grant from the NEA Inter-Arts program allowed Portillo to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's "discovery" of America in her own ironic fashion. Her 1993 film, Columbus on Trial showed at the London and Sundance Film festivals as well and was selected for the 1993 Whitney Museum Biennial. In 1994 she was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in recognition of her contributions to filmmaking. All of her work is widely shown in classrooms and academic circles and integrated into curriculum studies.
Portillo has collaborated extensively with noted directors Susana Muñoz and Nina Serrano and with Academy Award-winning editor Vivien Hillgrove. Working with other women artists has helped Portillo break down the proscriptions of traditional documentary making because "women, and women of color in particular, often come into filmmaking with a different set of objectives than their male counterparts." Portillo's films have received high praise at more than ten international women's film festivals.
In The Devil Never Sleeps, Portillo continues her effort to explore the Mexican psyche, and broaden the spectrum of screen representation of Latinos and Chicanos. Her tireless creative impulses are meanwhile driving her in new directions.
Currently in production is a narrative feature about a modern day Don Quixote: a filmmaker whose life and art become a beautiful hallucination and in her quest for the perfect film she gets lost along the way. The journey itself becomes her redemption and eventually her transformation. Ms. Portillo is also the executive producer for a low-budget comedy set in the urban underworld of cockfighting.
“Nuestro objetivo final es nada menos que lograr la integración del cine latinoamericano.
Así de simple, y así de desmesurado”.
