There is a kind of recognition that functions as a celebration. Not charity, and certainly not inclusion for its own optics, but the formal acknowledgement that something was missing, that the map was always bigger than the frame. The Best Indigenous Language North Africa category at AMVCA 12 is exactly that. It is the awards show looking at itself and saying, plainly: we need everyone at the table.
Two new categories debut at AMVCA 12: Best Indigenous Language North Africa and Best Indigenous Language Central Africa. Together with the existing West, East, and Southern Africa categories, this creates a full five-region structure for the first time, marking a grounding wholeness.
The languages recognised in the North Africa category – including Arabic dialects and Berber – are languages people use in their everyday lives to tell stories, express emotions, and share culture. They are not niche. Neither are they peripheral. They are among the most widely spoken on the continent, and they carry cinematic traditions that predate the AMVCA by generations.
To understand what this category means, you need to understand what it is entering.
Egyptian cinema is among the oldest and most technically sophisticated on the continent, a tradition that traces its roots to the 1890s, that produced icons like Faten Hamama and Omar Sharif, and that gave Arabic-language cinema its dominant aesthetic vocabulary across the twentieth century.
Tunisian cinema, smaller in output but formidable in critical reputation, has been a Cannes fixture over the decades, pushing against political constraints with a ferocity that distinguishes it from more commercially oriented industries. Libyan cinema, emerging fitfully from decades of institutional neglect and political turbulence, is among the continent's youngest in terms of infrastructure, but not in terms of story.
Sudan, currently navigating an unprecedented humanitarian crisis even as its filmmakers continue to work, carries a documentary and narrative tradition of deep moral seriousness. These are not industries arriving at the cinema for the first time. They are industries arriving at this particular stage for the first time.
The nominees reflect that breadth.
Abdalla Ezyan – The Delivery
Abdalla Ezyan holds the remarkable distinction of appearing twice in this inaugural category, with both The Delivery and This Is Portsaid earning nominations. That a single filmmaker should represent the category twice in its first year is less a coincidence than a signal: that the pipeline for North African cinema at this level exists, and that when the door opens, what comes through can be substantial enough to occupy multiple slots.
Abdalla Ezyan – This Is Portsaid
Port Said – Portsaid – sits at the northern entrance of the Suez Canal on the Mediterranean Sea, a city whose entire identity has been shaped by being a threshold, a crossing point, a place where routes converge.
Situated at the entrance of the Suez Canal, Port Said has played a significant role in Egypt's maritime trade and evolved into a bustling hub of activity, a melting pot of cultures whose history includes the 1956 Suez Crisis, the Canal Zone wars, and a distinctive local identity that is both emphatically Egyptian and unlike anywhere else in Egypt.
To make a film called This Is Portsaid is to plant a flag in a place that has never been treated as the centre of anything. That Ezyan does this in Egypt's first AMVCA cycle is a deliberate, place-specific act of cinematic claim.
Houssem Eddine Abdelwahed – The Hidden Voice
Tunisia's presence in this inaugural class, through Houssem Eddine Abdelwahed's The Hidden Voice, arrives at a complicated moment for Tunisian filmmaking.
Tunisian cinema has confronted mounting hurdles as new censorship rules are enacted and the brief window of freedom filmmakers enjoyed since the revolution appears to be gradually shrinking and yet, as the BFI has noted, Tunisian cinema has always been one of resistance. The Hidden Voice carries that context with it into this category.
Whatever its specific narrative, and the title itself suggests something suppressed, something that persists despite suppression, its presence here belongs to a longer story about what Tunisian cinema has always been willing to say and what it has always been willing to risk in saying it.
Mohamed Awad and Mohamed Abdulrahman Eldouma – Artal Alhanin: Our Memories
Sudan's entry, Artal Alhanin: Our Memories – the Arabic phrase translating roughly to "strings of longing" – arrives as perhaps the most politically loaded nomination in the entire AMVCA 12 cycle. Sudan has been at war since April 2023, a conflict that has produced one of the world's worst humanitarian crises and displaced millions.
That Sudanese filmmakers Mohamed Awad and Mohamed Abdulrahman Eldouma are making work, finding routes to recognition, and arriving at a pan-African awards ceremony despite all of that is a specific kind of statement about what filmmaking means when the conditions for it are being actively destroyed. Artal Alhanin: Our Memories – nostalgic, elegiac even in its title – is itself a form of preservation: the history of Sudanese cinema reveals the resiliency of SWANA societies and the richness of culture and experience.
Youssef Ben Khalifa – The Omnipresent
Tunisia's second entry in the category – making Tunisia the only country with two nominations alongside Egypt – The Omnipresent takes as its title a word that in Arabic and Islamic thought carries specific theological weight. Al-Muhit, the All-Encompassing, is one of the ninety-nine names of God.
Whether Youssef Ben Khalifa's film engages that dimension directly or uses the concept as a secular metaphor – presence that cannot be escaped, surveillance, the watchful eye of state or community or history – the title alone positions this work in a tradition of North African cinema that has never been afraid to make its frames as large as the questions it is asking.
What the five nominees in this inaugural category share is not a country, not a language, and not a genre. Egypt tells port city stories. Tunisia tells stories of hidden things. Sudan tells stories of memory amid obliteration. What they share is a relationship to cinema as something more than entertainment, as testimony, as resistance, as the insistence that a story told in Arabic, in Egyptian dialect, in Tunisian Darija, in Sudanese Arabic, is not a lesser story for the language it is told in. It is, in fact, the only language those stories could be told in truthfully.
The 12th AMVCAs are making the celebration of African excellence complete and structured. This category is the structure made visible. And the films sitting inside it – waiting to be seen, to be debated, to be honoured – are the proof that North African cinema has always been ready for this room. The room just took a while to open its door.
AMVCA 12 is proudly brought to you by Don Julio. The ceremony takes place on 9 May 2026 in Lagos. Vote here.