Bolivia

Violeta Ayala is an artist, writer, actress and film director born in Bolivia. She studied Theatre and Journalism at Charles Sturt University in Australia, where her curiosity in filmmaking began and she made Proyecto Vila Vila, a short film about the effects of cervical cancer on indigenous women in Bolivia, shown at the Sydney Latin Film Festival and the Al Jazeera Film Festival in Doha. In 2006 Violeta began her collaboration with Dan Fallshaw in North Africa on Between the Oil and the Deep Blue Sea, an investigative documentary about corruption in the oil industry, and Violeta wrote Slick Operator, an article on the same subject published on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald. In 2009 her first feature documentary Stolen premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and won many awards. Violeta is a Tribeca Film Institute Fellow and an alumnus of the Film Independent Documentary Lab. Violeta has participated on panels and discussion ranging from IDFA, Toronto, Art Exit, Stranger than Fiction in New York and many others. Her other film credits include The Bolivian Case (2015), which premiered as a Special Presentation at Hot Docs, and was nominated for Premios Platino and Fenix (the two most prestigious awards in Ibero-America); Cocaine Prison which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2017; and The Fight (2017) winner of the Doc Dispatch Award at the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival and Best Short at the International Human Rights Festival in Sucre, Bolivia.

Filmography

Proyecto Vila Vila (2005)
Between the Oil and the Deep Blue Sea (2006)
A Vegan in the Meat Aisle (2007)
Stolen (2009)
The Bolivian Case (2015)
Cocaine Prison (2017)
The Fight (2017)