Nigeria / South Africa

Akin Omotoso is a writer, actor, and director. He was born in 1974 in Nigeria and grew up in the university town of Ife where he found his first love, writing. In 1992, his family moved to South Africa after his father accepted a lectureship at the University of the Western Cape. Omotoso enrolled for the only course at the University of Cape Town that did not require a matric exemption, the Performers Diploma in Speech and Drama. He was cast in Sunjata, a play directed by Mark Fleishman and won The Fleur du Cap Award for Most Promising Student in 1995 for his role in the play and decided to pursue a career in the performing arts. Using money he made from acting to subsidize his directorial feats, he completed three short films: The Kiss of Milk, The Nightwalkers, and The Caretaker. In 1999 he wrote his first feature film, God is African. When God is African premiered in 2003, Omotoso was struggling with personal loss after his mother died from cancer. He decided to reprioritize his life and started a production company, T.O.M Pictures with Robbie Thorpe and Kgomotso Matsunyane. Omotoso and his production company went on to win Best South African Film at the New York Independent Film Festival in 2004. Omotoso directed the television series Jacob's Cross on Africa Magic, M-Net and SABC between 2007 and 2013. In 2010, he began working on Tell Me Sweet Something; which was influenced by Theodore Witchers′ Love Jones (1997). The film earned him a best director award at the 2016 Africa Magic Viewers Choice Awards in Lagos State. His 2016 film, Vaya, first premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2016 to critical praise and continued to make its rounds around the festival circuit and earned him the Africa Movie Academy Award for Best Director before landing at Ava DuVernay’s Array. In The Colour of Wine (2018), Omotoso traces the 300-year history of winemaking in South Africa, with a focus on post-apartheid challenges and the growing numbers of black winemakers, who previously excluded, are now making superior, internationally acclaimed wines. The film premiered at the 2018 IRepresent Documentary Film Festival in Lagos, Nigeria. He is one of the directors on the first Nigerian Netflix original series.

Filmography

Soul City (1994)
God is African (2002)
Gathering the Scattered Cousins (2006)
A Place Called Home (2006)
Soul Buddyz (2007)
Jesus and the Giant (2008)
Wole Soyinka: Child of the Forest (2009)
Man on Ground (2011)
End Game (2013)
Tell Me Sweet Something (2015)
Vaya (2016)
Fifty (2017)
Hotel Called Memory (2017)
The Ghost and the House of Truth (2019)