Lagos hosts African Movie Academy Awards

This year’s African Movie Academy Awards (AMAAs) will be held in Lagos, rather than its regular venue of Yenagoa in the coastal Bayelsa State in southern Nigeria.

The awards, which promote excellence in the African movie industry, take place on 22 April.

Since it began in 2005 the annual extravaganza has been hosted in Yenagoa, apart from in 2008 when it was staged in the Nigerian capital Abuja.

This year’s the event’s theme is “Africa Rising” and it will be presented by Jimmy Jean-Louis who received an AMAA Best Actor nomination last year for his performance in “Sinking Sands”.

At a recent ceremony in the Gambian capital Banjul, a total of 328 entries from across Africa were nominated for awards, an increase of over 100 compared to last year.

The entries vying for awards in the festival's 24 categories include 134 feature films, 88 shorts, 57 documentaries and six animations. 43 entries came from the “Africans in the Diaspora” section, which this year includes the US, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Jamaica and the UK.

The country with the most nominations was Nigeria, with 52, followed by South Africa with 45 and Ghana with 17. The most-nominated films are Nigeria’s “Adesuwa”, and South Africa’s “Otelo Burning” and “How to Steal 2 Million”.