Prolific and multiple award-winning Nigerian filmmaker, Obi Emelonye, says there have been a considerable improvement in the quality of movies produced in Nigeria lately.
Emelonye, who produced multiple award-winning films like ‘Mirror Boy’, ‘Last Flight To Abuja’, ‘Onye Ozi’ amongst others, told the BBC in an interview that the Nigerian film industry, fondly called Nollywood, has made efforts recently to make quality flicks.
The England-based Nigerian filmmaker further enthused being among those who have raised the bar in the industry.
“I consider myself lucky to be one of the people taking the magic of Nollywood to the rest of the world,” Emelonye said.
He made this comment when he was contacted by the BBC to speak on the visit of President Muhammadu Buhari to India.
According to Emelonye, both Nigeria and India are ‘somehow similar when explored deeper. Nigeria and India share common colonial heritage and are also both multi-cultural and populous countries.’ He added that, “You could say there are strong similarities with the way we see the world.”
Speaking on the improvement in Bollywood, the filmmaker said, “In the 80s, we watched Indian films that were not even subtitled but through the language of film and interpretation of emotions, we could understand the message they were passing.
“By comparison, Nollywood is over 20 years old, while the Indian cinema just turned 102. So, you would expect that the Indian film has developed more than Nollywood especially in the qualitative side.
“However, we are also finding ourselves in the qualitative side. The digital world has given us that opportunity to do this because we can now buy a camera for less than £100,000 and give you a similar quality of a $1m film.”
