Africa is a Country

This is Nollywood directed by Franco Sacchi, DVD only, 56 minutes, 2007, Nigeria. Producer: Franco Sacchi and Robert Caputo, Associate Producer: Aimee Corrigan. Distributed by California Newsreel.

Popular interest in Nollywood, the southern Nigerian film industry, is fast gaining traction in the West. Not least because the 16 year-old industry is the third largest in the world (Hollywood is first, Bollywood second). Profits are estimated at more than  $250 million (measured in 2006). Crews put out between 500 and 1000 films annually, employ thousands of people (if mostly on an informal basis) and make their films on the cheap (maximum budget, $20,000).

Nollywood’s fan base is just limited to Nigeria. West Africans in general are big Nollywood fans, and the films have a growing following in Eastern and Southern Africa. The large Nigerian diaspora in North America and Western Europe also presents a ready market.

At least three recent documentary films by Western directors focusing on this phenomenon have been released in the last three years.

Welcome to Nollywood (directed by American Jamie Meltzer) first started showing at film festivals and summer screenings here last summer. This was followed by This is Nollywood directed by Italian Franco Sacchi, which I viewed this weekend. The most recent Nollywood Babylon is scheduled for premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2009.

This is Nigeria certainly repeats the formula of Welcome to Nollywood. That includes treating Nollywood as part novelty act, but also exploring what makes the genre work and what can be learned from it: this include the adaptation and use of new digital technology, including smaller, user-friendly cameras and cheap computer-based editing programs. Nollywood’s finance and distribution models — largely informal — is also attracting the attention of Western filmmakers struggling to make independent films.

As for how it tells this story, like Welcome to Nollywood, This is Nigeria focuses on the story of a single director and his quest the making of an action film, Check Point.

Check Point is a typical Nollywood production. It has a nine-day shooting schedule and very limited budget. Director Bond Emeruwa, the film’s producer and its ensemble cast of actors go on location outside Nigeria’s commercial capital Lagos to shoot their film about crooked cops. The shoot faces a number of challenges:  actors starring in three or four movies simultaneously wreaking havoc on shooting schedules or weather stoppages (no sound stages, back lots or studios), among others. At one point a shoot is shot down for half a day because of fasting Muslims praying over loudspeakers during Ramadan. Later the rain calls a halt to proceedings. The crew remains resilient, if not philosophical, throughout this. The film eventually gets completed in eleven days.

Sacchi occasionally cuts away from his central focus to  recount the history of Nollywood. The industry traces its history to the video release in 1992 of the feature film Living in Bondage, a story about the occult. At the time Nigerian public television had cut back on producing local productions, opting instead to rebroadcast cheap American fare. Living in Bondage‘s focus on telling local stories appealed to viewers and soon a new crop of directors wanted to imitate its success. Today, there are more than 50 million VHS and VCD recorders in Nigerian homes, shops and bars showing these films and a local film industry has developed in Nigeria’s commercial capital, Lagos.

This is Nollywood also addresses some of the shortcomings of Nollywood: the quality of productions (some first-time viewers may take some time getting used to the low production standards) and the repetitive plots, among others, but the producers and directors, as well as actors, are very proud of their labor, insisting they make films for people, not film festivals or art cinema houses. To make stories for local markets drive their work. As director Emeruwa explains: “We are telling our own stories in our own way, our Nigerian way, African way … I cannot tell the white man’s story. I don’t know what his story is all about. He tells me his story in his movies. I want him to see my stories too.”