AMAA calls for African entries

Africa Movie Academy Awards (AMAA) recently announced that it is now calling for entries for the 2013 edition to be held in April next year. The deadline for submissions is 30 December 2012 and nominations will be announced in the first week of March.

Acceptable genres include feature length films, shorts and documentary entries. Only films produced, premiered and or released between December 2011 and November 2012 are eligible. Features may not exceed 120 minutes and shorts should not be longer than 40 minutes.

The AMAAs are an offshoot of the Africa Film Academy. The Academy, founded on the best film tradition, is geared towards research, training and propagating film making in Africa. Established in 2005, AMAA aims to facilitate the development and relevance of African film & cinema by providing a rewards & recognition platform for film makers on the continent. African film makers work hard with very little and have, not through serendipity but through sheer audacity, managed to build the 3rd largest film industry in the world, and are poised to take poll position, beating America and India.

Previous AMAA winners include How 2 Steal 2 Million (South Africa), Toussaint Louverture (Senegal/France), The Education of Auma Obama (Germany) and White Sugar In A Black Pot (USA).

 

Little One vies for Oscar

It has been reported that Director Darrell Roodt's latest film, "Little One", has been confirmed as South Africa's entry into the Best Foreign Film category for next year's Oscars. The announcement was made by the South African Academy Award Selection Committee and the National Film and Video Foundation.

"Yesterday", another film by Roodt, was nominated for an Oscar in 2005.If approved by the Oscars Academy Award Selection Committee, which makes its final selection of nominees in January, the film will represent South Africa at the 85th Annual Academy Awards in 2013.

Little One tells a story of a six-year-old girl (Vuyelwa Msimang), who is found left for dead on the dunes near a township in Johannesburg. She is found by a middle-aged woman, Pauline played by Lindiwe Ndlovu, who rushes her to hospital.

 Saving her life, it transpires that the little girl has been raped and her face beaten in so badly that she doesn't even look human anymore. The story then follows Pauline's journey as she becomes actively involved with the child's case, from going to the extreme of kidnapping the girl from the hospital after her unsuccessful attempt to adopt her, to conducting her own investigation into what happened to the little girl.