Taylor Alison Swift is an American singer-songwriter. She is known for narrative songs about her personal life, which have received widespread media coverage. At age 14, Swift became the youngest artist signed by the Sony/ATV Music publishing house and, at 15, she signed her first record deal.
Her 2006 eponymous debut album was the longest-charting album of the 2000s in the US. Its third single, "Our Song", made her the youngest person to single-handedly write and perform a number-one song on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. Swift's second album, Fearless, was released in 2008.
Buoyed by the pop crossover success of the singles "Love Story" and "You Belong with Me", it became the US' best-selling album of 2009 and was certified diamond in the US. The album won four Grammy Awards, and Swift became the youngest Album of the Year winner.
Pan-African Financial Institution Afreximbank Poised To Launch $1B African Film Fund
deadline.comCairo-based African Export-Import Bank, also known as Afreximbank, is gearing up to launch a $1B African Film Fund in 2024 to support the continent’s burgeoning film industry.
Kanayo Awani, Executive Vice President of Afreximbank’s Intra-African Trade Bank, announced the initiative in the opening speech of the 2023 Canex (Creative Africa Nexus) Summit in Cairo on Friday.
She said the fund would oversee film financing, co-finance with large studios, finance African filmmakers and finance producers and directors of film projects across the continent.
Awani noted that Afreximbank had already announced the doubling of financing it was making available to the creative sector in Africa to $1B at the 2022 edition of Canex, and currently had $600M invested in film, music, visual arts, fashion, and sports projects. “The very first film we financed recently premiered at the Toronto Film Festival,” Awani said, adding, “The Bank has several in the pipeline from Nigeria, South Africa, and Kenya, which should be on streaming platforms in 2024.” Awani said the film and audiovisual industries in Africa currently accounted for $5B of the African continent’s GDP and employed an estimated five million people, with the potential to create over 20 million jobs and generate $20B in revenues annually in the future.
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