Lourdes Portillo
is a filmmaker of undoubted importance for Latin American nonfiction cinema. Her lucid filmography oscillates between documentary, experimental film and video art. Astutely inscribing herself to the genealogy of Third Cinema, she became a pioneer in the exploration of Latin American identity within and outside of the United States. Dealing with themes of extreme sociopolitical complexity and exploring them through a meticulous investigation guided by intuition and feeling, Lourdes’ work – which has documented situations from Argentina to California – carefully highlights the postcolonial relationalities that have emerged in the various societies that reside in the continent commonly referred to as the “Americas”. [...] This is a film in which Lourdes rerouted her experimentation towards the task of informing audiences in the United States about Bolivian, Dominican and Haitian societies and cultures. Portillo weaves together a documentary that is at once formally conventional while also defiant of the model in which it was produced due to its insightful social, political and aesthetic study. This documentary directly speaks of the consequences and changing contradictions that have occured in these territories due to European colonization and the neo-colonial process coming from the United States. Making use of a procedural approximation, she shows us the crystallized elements but also a point of demonstrating that we are witnessing cultures in the process of transformation and hybridization: presenting traits and fragments of who they were and who they will become. (Portillo, Lourdes. Interview with Eduardo Makoszay.
Corrientes, Nov-Dec 2020,
www.corrient.es/portillo-makoszay-eng)
