Lourdes Portillo, a Mexican moviemaker who stands out for her social-oriented experimental works, will be praised by MoMA in New York City with a retrospective function that will highlight some the main milestones of her career, including her latest flick entitled Al más allá (2008).
Lourdes Portillo: La cineasta inquisitivawill stretch out June 22-30, together with the 58th edition of the Robert Flaherty Movie Seminar and the 40th Anniversary of Women Make Movies, the largest American distributor of films about and by women.
Portillo was born in Chihuahua (Mexico, 1944) and was brought up in Los Angeles (California). That two-nation experience has marked her entire work, characterized by an exploration of Latin America and topics related to social justice, especially the predicaments of women. That’s why this artist is considered an investigative journalist and a women’s rights activist.
She graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute, where she studied in the 1970s and 80s. This period sharpened her view of Chicano filmmaking, experimentation and social-oriented documentaries. Her second movie, the Oscar-nominated Las Madres: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (1985) is part of the program, together with La ofrenda (1989), El diablo nunca duerme (1996), 3:15 Mirrors of the Heart (1992),Columbus on Trial (1993), Vida (1989) and Señorita extraviada (2001), among others.
In addition to that Oscar nomination, Portillo’s projects have also grabbed such major awards as the Golden Needle at the San Francisco Film Festival, as well as the People’s Choice awards and Women Journalists at the Films de Femmes in Creteil, France.
