El diablo nunca duerme
USA,
1994, 84 min
Shown in 1995
CREDITS
- dir
-
Lourdes Portillo
- prod
-
Lourdes Portillo
- cam
-
Kyle Kibbe
- editor
-
Vivien Hillgrove
- source
-
Xochitl Films
- gga award
-
Golden Spire, Bay Area Film & Video: Documentary
-
COMMENTS
Lourdes Portillo in person.
OTHER
When San Francisco filmmaker Lourdes Portillo (Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, SFIFF 1986; La Ofrenda, SFIFF 1989) heard that her uncle Oscar back home in Chihuahua, Mexico had died under questionable circumstances, her immediate response was to make a film about it. The result is a documentary mystery, a first-person real-life thriller. Playing the filmmaker/detective, Portillo conducts her relentless investigation by interviewing relatives, taping phone conversations, examining the death scene and gathering the evidence: family pictures, home movies, news clippings. The story unfolds like a well-crafted suspense movie. Every new revelation confirms two contradictory conclusions: he committed suicide/he was murdered; he was an exemplary paterfamilias/he was a philanderer; his wife was a humble-born beauty queen who did charity work/she was a vindictive child beater, scheming to get his money. At the end we seem to know everything about Uncle Oscar’s death except what actually happened. The Devil Never Sleeps probes the maze of contradictions in human nature in an ever-tightening spiral until we get to the center and discover the final truth: how you can love someone you will never really know.
—Miguel Pendás
FACTOID #328
Saul Bass, the genius graphic designer behind the introductory sequences to Hitchcock’s Psycho, Vertigo and North by Northwest, designed the posters for the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth installments of the San Francisco International Film Festival.
