At 2:30pm on Thursday, October 19, 2006, a handover ceremony between the Indian Embassy in Ethiopia and the organizers of the Abyssinia Film Awards, Shakaina Entertainment, took place under the shade of the trees at Tropical Gardens.
 

The event involved the Indian Embassy presenting 20 award sculptures for the 20 final categories that individuals and production companies will be nominated for during the Abyssinia Film Award event that is to take place in December 2006.
 

The design of the sculptures was made by Ethiopian, Nebiyou Yitayew and American, Mike Jaconda, for Shakaina. The manufacturing expense, which amounted to 200,000 Br was covered by the Indian Embassy.
 

The Abyssinia Awards will include around 80 films made by Ethiopians living both locally and internationally. A panel of 43 judges that are experts in different fields of filming such as acting, writing and cinematography will be judging each of the 80 movies so that they can come up with the nominees and eventually the winners of the different categories.
 

Henok Abeje, project manager of the Abyssinia Awards told Fortune that Shakaina decided to organize the Awards because so many movies have been coming up in the past few years, which made them think that it was important to acknowledge both the growth in numbers of productions and the motivation that filmmakers in Ethiopia have shown.
 

Daniel Abebe, who is also a project manager of the Awards, told Fortune that the reason for the timing of the event was based on the simple fact that previously, there were not a significant number of films being released in Addis Abeba; hence an Award would have been pointless at that time. But now that movies are being shown at Cinemas and people are genuinely responding to Ethiopian productions, organizing the Abyssinia Film Awards finally made sense.
 

Ideally, the event was supposed to be organized earlier in the year, but according to the project managers, the work had exceeded their expectations so they had to postpone the date.
 

Henok said that for two years, they had to go through research and data collection on the film industry, going as way back as 30 years ago and the first Ethiopian film production. He explained that Shakiana had a variety of goals that it wanted to fulfil along with the Awards. The organizers wanted to launch an informative filming magazine, and they wanted to organize the Ethiopian Academy of Motion Pictures and Arts Association.
 

 “We want to inform the world about Ethiopian Films,” Henok said.
 

And they might me be closer to doing that; during his speech at the Gardens, the Indian Ambassador, Gurjit Singh, told the audience as well as the organizers that if Shakaina Entertainment actually managed to launch the Abyssinia Film Awards before the year 2006 ended, then the Indian Embassy promises to sponsor the next two Abyssinia Awards.

The Italian Cultural Institute  for its part promised  organizers that it will search for filming training programs that it can arrange for prospective filmmakers. And the Cultural Attaché from the Israeli Embassy promised that the winner for Best Picture will be invited to the Jerusalem Film Festival as a contender.

Shakaina Entertainment was established in 2002 and has 25 Ethiopian members living both locally and internationally. Its mandate is to support the growth of Ethiopian films and the filmmakers behind this growth so as to take the industry one step ahead.