LATIN AMERICAN DOCUMENTARIANS
HOMMAGE TO LOURDES PORTILLO

After the recovery in previous editions of the work of pioneers of Latin American documentary filmmaking such as Rosa Martha Fernández, Sara Gómez, Marta Rodríguez, and Margot Benacerraf, this cicle focuses on Lourdes Portillo, a Mexican filmmaker who died in April 2024 in San Francisco and was one of the key figures in the Chicano cultural and film movement.
Lourdes Portillo was born in Chihuahua and immigrated to the United States as a teenager, where she became a deeply political director, with a body of work ranging from her early work in the 1970s as part of the Marxist collective Cine Manifest to documentaries such as Las madres: The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, for which she was nominated for an Oscar and reached a wide audience.
In one of the many interviews conducted by her friend Rosa Linda Fregoso, she explains how this life journey led her to become a channel for marginalised communities, including migrants, Chicanos, Latinas and lesbians. Her work, like that of other Chicana artists such as Gloria Anzaldúa, inhabits border spaces, margins, and edges, questioning the conventions of political cinema and always pushing the limits of traditional models. It’s a way of understanding cinema that’s full of curiosity, love, and compassion for the issues it deals with, which are as diverse as gender politics, state repression, colonization, and HIV.
Her films, still relatively unknown in Europe, enjoyed great visibility in the United States and Mexico, reaching diverse audiences and circles, including academics, activists, community members and the general public. Her cinema not only questions, but also proposes new perspectives based on love and political commitment.

Full programme in Catalan↗