The Devil Never Sleeps (film)

The Devil Never Sleeps (El diablo nunca duerme) is a 1994 Mexican-American documentary film directed by Lourdes Portillo and produced by Portillo and Michelle Valladares.

In 2020, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Plot
Film maker Lourdes Portillo gets a call that her uncle Oscar had died. Initial cause of death was claimed to have been a heart attack but police later ruled his death as a suicide. Portillo goes to her hometown of Chihuahua, Mexico to find out how her uncle died. Interviewing family members and friends of Oscar, Portillo finds out details of her uncle she never heard before.

Development
The film was funded by ITVS (Independent Television Service). Inspiration for the film came from Errol Morris' 1988 film The Thin Blue Line.

Release
The Devil Never Sleeps premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. The film was shown on PBS on October 30, 1997.

The film has been released on DVD, for sale on Women Make Movies and on Portillo's website.

Reception
Desmond Ryan for The Philadelphia Inquirer remarked that Portillo used an imaginative range of techniques and allusions to illuminate the investigation of her uncle's death. Emmanuel Levy writing for Variety, while noting the film to have "a healthy dose of humor and some introspective commentary", felt its scope was limited and was crudely executed. Despite criticizing it for lacking depth and calling its visuals "shapeless", Levy considered The Devil Never Sleeps to be mildly entertaining. The use of presenting the mystery of uncle Oscar's death by intercutting it with soap operas and projecting interviews through sunglasses was described by LA Weekly's Hazel-Dawn Dumpert to be "breathtaking".

Reviewing for The New York Times, Stephen Holden, considered its concept to have promise, but overall thought the films conclusions were too vague and scattered to make a compelling drama. Frank Zoretich for the Albuquerque Journal was negative towards the film, calling it "pretentious and probably slanderous piece of baloney". Zoretich criticized its use of gimmicks throughout and believed that Portillo failed to prove her point.

In 2020, Broady included the film as part of his "Sixty-two Films That Shaped the Art of Documentary Filmmaking" list. The same year, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

Reactions from Portillo's family varied, with one of her aunts refusing to see the film.

Awards

 * 1994 IDA Award: IDA Distinguished Documentary Achievement Awards