Bio
Alana Mejía González is an award-winning Mediterranean/Colombian cinematographer currently based in London. She combines narrative and commercial work in both film (16mm & 35mm) and digital cinematography with documentary and art films. In the last year, Alana has jumped into long format shooting a Netflix original fiction 8-episodes show in India soon to be released; the thriller, Manticore, Carlos Vermut’s last feature film and Rocio Mesa’s debut film Drying Barns. All to be released in 2022.
In 2016, she received La Caixa fellowship to complete her MA studies in Cinematography at the prestigious National Film and TV School of UK. Her work has taken her to be selected among Berlinale Talents Cinematographers 2019. The same year, she received the BSC Emerging Cinematography Award on the student section for her work on The Girl With Two Heads.
In the past years, some of the short films she’s DP have made it into major international film festivals. Among them, The Girl With Two Heads, directed by Betzabé García, won the Best Short Film Awards at 66th San Sebastian Film Festival (mentioning its innovative visual storytelling), and at 16th Morelia International Film Festival and 10th Les Arcs International Film Festival and IndieLisboa IFF 2019. It was also screened at 59th Cannes Film Festival, 49th Rotterdam IFF among many others. She's lensed Forastera a short directed by Lucia Aleñar selected at Cannes Critics' Week 2020; as well as That Summer, We Stayed Home short premiered at Malaga Film Festival directed by Noelia R. Deza
The creative documentary short, Playhouse dir. Add Elling premiered at Sheffield IFF in 2019, and then went on touring festivals like Sarajevo IFF and DOK Leipzig. She’s photographed the short film End-O, dir. Alice Seabright which premiered at London Film Festival before its world premiere at Clermont Ferrand in 2020. On the commercial side, her collaboration with director Federico Mazzarisi over the spot Extraordinary Normality for Stella Stella McCartney Breast Cancer Awareness was nominated to the British Arrows in 2019.
Her background is in documentary photography, performance and contemporary art. However, she started in the world of cinema as an actor when she was 14 but shortly after she realized her passion was to be behind camera. She graduated with a BA in Audio-visual Communication at UC3M with exchange programs in the American University of Beirut (Lebanon) and Bilgi University in Istanbul (Turkey) while working as a freelance photographer and videographer for different documentary, narrative and commercial projects.
Between 2014 – 2015, she lived in Chisinau, Moldova where she shot and directed, Disputed sovereignty, a cross-media documentary about the youth of Transnistria (a self-proclaimed pro-Russian republic.) Shortly after she was selected for the Locarno Film Festival Doc Academy 2016
Alana shows a strong interest in the international narrative power of images which has made her travel around the world collecting knowledge from different cultures in lighting and visual storytelling. She speaks English, Spanish, French and Italian.