Nollywood, Nigeria’s booming film industry, is the world’s third largest producer of feature films. Unlike Hollywood and Bollywood, the Nigerian movies are done on shoe-string budgets of time and money. An average production takes about 20 days and costs approximately $15,000.
Yet in just 21 years, the industry has grown from nothing into raking about $250 million a year. Nollywood also employs thousands of people. The Nollywood phenomenon was made possible by two main ingredients: Nigerian entrepreneurship and digital technology.
In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, Lagos and other African cities were faced with growing epidemics of crime and insecurity. Movie theaters were closed as people became reluctant to go out to the streets after dark. Videos for home viewing imported from the West and India were only mildly popular. Nigerians saw an opportunity to fill the void with products of their own.
Experts credit the birth of Nollywood to a businessman who needed to unload thousands of blank tapes and to the 1992 video release of ‘Living in Bondage’, a movie with a tale of the occult, which became an instant and huge-selling venture. It wasn’t long before other would-be producers jumped on the bandwagon.
Currently, over 300 producers churn out movies at an astonishing rate—somewhere between 500 and 1,000 a year. Nigerian directors have adopted new technologies as soon as they became affordable. Bulky videotape cameras gave way to their digital descendants, which are now being replaced by HD cameras. Editing, music, and other post-production work are now being done with common computer-based systems. The films go straight to DVD and VCD discs.
Nollywood stars are native Nigerians. Nollywood settings are familiar. The plots depict situations that people understand and confront daily; romance, comedy, the occult, crooked cops, prostitution, and HIV/AIDS.
Indeed, the Nigerian movie industry have become influential that it has inspired thriving home video industries across Africa such as Gollywood (Ghana), Camwood (Cameroon), Riverwood (Kenya), Ugowood (Uganda) and the brand new Jollywood, South Sudan’s film industry that is slowly taking shape with the appearance of ‘Jamila’ early this year, the first locally-produced movie in the newest country of the world that celebrated its first year of independence in July 2013.
One distinct thing about Nollywood is that, unlike Hollywood and Bollywood, it does not physically exist in any city but it is spread across Nigeria, even giving birth to thriving sub-sectors known as Kanywood (the Hausa language movie industry in the north) and Yorywood, the Yoruba language variant in Lagos.
“We are telling our own stories in our own way,” director Bond Emeruwa once said in an interview. “That is the appeal both for the filmmakers and for the audience,” he added.
The appeal stretches far beyond Nigeria. Nollywood films are proving popular all over English-speaking Africa and have become a staple on M-NET, the South African based satellite television network. Nigerian stars have become household names from Ghana to Zambia and beyond.
The last few years have seen the growing popularity of Nollywood films among African diaspora in both Europe and America.
Nollywood is indeed African pride.
Additional information from ‘This Is Nollywood’
© 2014 Nigeriafilms.com
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