By Emmanuel Folarin
The organizers African Movie Academy Awards (AMAA) on Tuesday explained the choice of Lagos, Nigeria for the 2016 edition, saying the last year’s event was negatively impacted by delay in visa issuance by South Africa, the host country.
According to the 0rganisers of one of African prestigious events for rewarding and celebrating creativity in the movie industry, the 12th edition of AMAA, will hold on 30th of April, 2016 in Lagos while entries are already coming in from across Africa.
Founder of AMAA, Ms Peace Anyiam- Osigwe who spoke at a press conference in Lagos, said the nominations of the AMAA 2016 edition will take place on 17th to 20th March, 2016 in conjunction of an African Cinema Business Roundtable Event, in Dubai were discussions will focus on Africa as the new frontier for creative investment.
Specifically, on the challenges faced in the last edition held in South Africa she said, “One of our greatest disappointments last year in AMAA was the fact that countries like Cameroun, Cape-Verde, Mauritian, Ethiopian struggled to get their visa to come into South Africa. Ghana got their visa on the day of AMAA by 6pm.”
On the choice of Lagos for this year event, she explained that “We don’t want to face that problem of having an AMAA event and our nominees are not there. We are very friendly and accommodating in Nigeria. For us to get visa, we had to go through the South African president. We lost a lot of money to airlines because we always fly all our nominees.”
On AMAA’s achievement over the years, she said it had sponsored over 15,000 flights for Nigerians to expose them to the film circles around the world, “because we believe the more they go out, the more they learn, network and more wealth comes to our African cinemas.”
She also solicited for the support of the media at projecting the best of Africa to the world.
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