Lourdes Portillo, Oscar-Nominated Documentary Filmmaker, Dies at 80

Lourdes Portillo, an Oscar-nominated, Mexican-born documentary filmmaker whose work explored Latin American social issues, died on Saturday at her home in San Francisco. She was 80.

Her death was confirmed by her friend Soco Aguilar. No cause was given.

One of Ms. Portillo’s best-known works is her 1994 documentary “The Devil Never Sleeps,” a murder-mystery in which she investigated the strange death of her multimillionaire uncle, whose widow claimed he had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. In 2020, the Library of Congress selected the film for the National Film Registry.

“Using vintage snapshots, old home movies and interviews, the film builds a biographical portrait of Oscar Ruiz Almeida, a Mexican rancher who amassed a fortune exporting vegetables to the United States and went on to become a powerful politician and businessman,” Stephen Holden, of The New York Times, wrote in a review in 1995.

The documentary had the tenor of a telenovela and presented open questions about Mr. Ruiz Almeida’s mysterious life and death and the people who could have had a motive for the murder.

“The more Oscar is discussed, the more enigmatic he seems,” Mr. Holden wrote.

Ms. Portillo crafted the film’s story line from the information her mother had relayed over the phone while Ms. Portillo was living in New York, she said in a talk at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles last year.

The museum screened the movie last year as part of a series honoring her and other filmmakers who have made significant contributions to cinema.