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

Lourdes Portillo, the Oscar-nominated Mexican-born documentary filmmaker whose work explored Latin American social issues through spellbinding narratives, has died. She was 80.

Ms. Portillo died Saturday at her home in San Francisco. 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 Ms. Portillo investigates 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 preservation at 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, a Times movie critic, wrote in a 1995 review of the film.

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 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.