Performances of The Devil Never Sleeps/El diablo nunca duerme
Résumé
Returning to the memories of her childhood with The Devil Never Sleeps/El diablo nunca duerme, Lourdes Portillo locates herself at the unstable intersection of various roles : niece, coming back to Chihuahua after the mysterious death of a beloved uncle ; detective, trying to find out if he commited suicide or if he was murdered, as some of her relatives suggested ; and documentarist, an outsider living abroad yet filming her own family. As she travels across cultures and moves the documentary toward detective movies and telenovelas, she seems to propose a broad crossover to diverse audiences. Yet it is not an harmonious one ; the film playfully undermines the various cultural frameworks it enters and does not seek to ease the tensions of its audiences in the theater, the classroom, and the living room. The Devil Never Sleeps calls to mind feminist performance art, one that confers an active role to the spaces in which it takes place and calls upon personal appropriations to trigger collective debates.