Work
Portillo's films tend to focus on Latin America and the Latin American experience in the United States. Her film debut, for example, the 1979 Después del Terremoto, focuses on the experience of a Nicaraguan refugee of the 1972 Managua earthquake in San Francisco. It was followed by Madres: The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, a 1986 co-production with the Argentine director Susana Blaustein Muñoz which documented the actions of Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group of Argentine women who gather weekly at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires to remember their children that were murdered or "disappeared" by the military regime.
Other films have centered on Day of the Dead celebrations, Selena, the Female homicides in Ciudad Juárez, and AIDS.
She has also collaborated with the Chicano comedy troupe Culture Clash on two productions: Columbus on Trial and Culture Clash: Mission Magic Mystery Tour. She has also collaborated with the San Francisco Mime Troupe.
Read more about this topic: Lourdes Portillo
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.”
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“Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist—the only thing he’s good for—is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning. Even if it’s only his view of a meaning. That’s what he’s for—to give his view of life.”
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“The common experience is, that the man fits himself as well as he can to the customary details of that work or trade he falls into, and tends it as a dog turns a spit. Then he is part of the machine he moves; the man is lost.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)