2020 ShortFest Archive
SPECIAL MENTION: Best Documentary Short
film synopsis
film details
director biography
Lali Houghton (Nairobi, 1980) is Peruvian-British filmmaker based in Lima, who specialises in observational documentaries and current affairs films for international broadcasters including the BBC, Discovery, Al Jazeera, Channel 4, Netflix and Vice News. Over the past several years, Lali has made various films on the War on Drugs. These include Al Jazeera’s two-part documentary series Snow of the Andes, Vice’s Cocaine and Faith, and Al Jazeera Witness documentaries Racing in the Cocaine Valley and Venezuela: Smuggling Dreams, the latter of which was a finalist for the Rory Peck Awards. In 2014, Lali spent 8 months filming Channel 4’s documentary First Contact: Last Tribe of the Amazon, which follows the plight of two tribes during initial contact in the borderlands of Peru and Brazil. The documentary won an RTS (Royal Television Sociery) for science and natural history. In 2016, Lali directed and shot documentaries for Al Jazeera's Latin America Investigates series, one investigating the origins of a death squad in El Salvador linked to police, the other about slavery inside Sao Paulo's textile industry.