Lourdes Portillo

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Lourdes Portillo (born c. 1944) Is the Sister-in-Law of Sylvia Morales a Television Director who has worked at KCET and her brother actor Esai Morales who has also appeared on KCET and was cast in the film The Virgin of Juarez. Lourdes Portillo is a well known Chicana film-maker.

Portillo has dedicated her career as a filmmaker almost entirely to Latin American issues. She made her debut in 1979, when she directed Después del Terremoto, which was translated into English as "After the Earthquake".

Portillo spent the next several years researching for future films to be made. In 1985, Portillo travelled to Argentina, where she teamed with Argentine director Susana Blaustein Muñoz to record a documentary named Madres: The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo. The 64-minute film, released in 1986, was about the organization named Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group of Argentine women who gather weekly in the famed Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires to remember their children that were murdered or "disappeared" by the military regime, and the victims themselves.

In 1988, Portillo directed Las Ofrendas: The Day of the Dead, a documentary about a yearly celebration in Mexico.

Portillo kept producing and directing films about the Hispanic experience in 1989, when she released Vida ("Life"), and in 1992, when she directed Columbus on Trial, about Christopher Columbus.

Lourdes Portillo continued her work as a director with 1993 Mirrors of the Heart. In 1994, she made her screenwriting debut with El Diablo Nunca Duerme ("The Devil Never Sleeps").

Her next feature, Sometimes My Feet Go Numb, filmed in 1996 but released in 1997, was also her first long feature: lasting two hours and twenty three minutes, it was about people that live with AIDS.

In 1999, Portillo produced and directed Corpus, a series of home films about slain Tejano singer Selena Quintanilla, an icon among Hispanics both in the United States and most of Latin America. Corpus earned Portillo an award at the San Francisco International Film Festival (the Golden Spire). This was the first award earned by Portillo as a filmmaker.

After two years, Portillo returned to filming documentaries, recording what may be her most compelling work so far, Señorita Extraviada ("Missing Young Woman"), which deals with the female homicides in Ciudad Juárez. In it, Portillo details the suffering of the victim's families, as well as details about the victims and/or missing women themselves and the insecurity women in Ciudad Juárez face, among other things. Portillo has not released any documentaries since Señorita Extraviada.

Although she is criticized by other Film-Makers for her portrayal of Women as either weak victims or her comical perspective of their strengths, she is considered a much better Film-Maker than her Sister-In-Law Sylvia Morales.