Lourdes Portillo, Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker, dies aged 80

Lourdes Portillo, the Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker, has died at the age of 80.

The Mexican director, producer and writer, perhaps best known for the 1986 film The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, passed away in her San Francisco home.

Portillo was known for her bold filmmaking style that confronted issues around race, sexuality and social justice, and often featured stories and experiences of Latin American, Mexican and Chicano culture.

Born in Chihuahua, Mexico in 1943, she moved to Los Angeles as a teenager, where she became part of a Marxist filmmaking collective, Cine Manifest, in the ‘70s, eventually working on her first film, After the Earthquake, in 1979.

In addition to her extensive work in documentary features, Portillo went on to gain a reputation in the worlds of video installation and screenwriting, and also worked in investigative journalism and visual art.

She co-directed The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo with Susana Blaustein Muñoz. The film followed a group of women in Argentina who regularly meet up after the murders or ‘disappearances’ of their sons by the military regime.

The film won several international film awards, and was nominated at the 1987 Oscars, losing out in the Best Documentary Feature category to Broken Rainbow.

The success of that film gave her work a broader platform, and later films including The Devil Never Sleeps, an exploration of the strange circumstances of the death of her uncle, and Missing Young Woman, the latter of which investigated the kidnap, rape and murder of over 350 young women in Mexico, made a significant impact.

It is thought that in recent years she had been planning a new documentary film, titled Looking At Ourselves.

Portillo is survived by her three sons and younger sister.