Hooray for Nollywood

Two documentaries shine a light on the
popular and peculiar Nigerian film industry

INDEPENDENT INNOVATION: Welcome to Nollywood

by MATTHEW FRASER

The Nigerian film industry, known as Nollywood, is the third largest in the world (after Bollywood and Hollywood), and represents quite possibly the weirdest film culture ever. The numbers are fascinating—2,500 films a year, most made for under $10,000—and the films themselves even more so. Shot on consumer-level video cameras and distributed in outdoor markets, the films’ thematic ambitions are inversely proportional to their budgets—they tend to be delirious mash-ups of romance, action and mysticism, combining hysterical energy, irony-free melodrama and an aesthetic somewhere between a soap opera and a high-school video project.

Curious film fans will get two opportunities for a crash course in Nollywood, as both Film Pop and the Festival du nouveau cinéma are presenting documentaries on the subject. Both are worth seeing for the different perspectives they take: Jamie Meltzer’s Welcome to Nollywood, screening at Film Pop, is an in-depth look at the actual moviemaking, whereas Nollywood Babylon at FNC, from local documentarians Samir Mallal and Ben Addelman (Discordia, Bombay Calling), takes a long view on the social context of the phenomenon. Film Pop is also showing Femi Agbayewa’s 40-minute film In God’s Country, billed as the first “Nollywood USA” production.

Welcome to Nollywood follows two filmmakers: Izu Ojukwu, who attempts to take Nollywood cinema to the next level with a cast-of-thousands war movie, and Chico Ejiro, known as “Mr. Prolific” for his 80-plus movies. Ejiro’s prodigious output pales, however, to that of Lancelot Imasuen, who Nollywood Babylon documents shooting his 157th production. Imasuen is a larger-than-life character who berates his cast and crew when he’s not leading them in gospel hymns to bless the film equipment. (Evangelical Christianity is huge in Nigeria, and the film also explores how churches fund many films, then shamelessly plug them from the pulpit.)

RAW TALENT: Nollywood Babylon

LAWLESS IN LAGOS

Mallal and Addelman, who discovered the Nollywood phenomenon at an FNC showcase in 2005, spent the bulk of last year shooting in Lagos, the chaotic capital of Nigeria, whose population of 14 million makes it the biggest city in Africa. “A lot of crazy shit happened there,” laughs Mallal. “I got arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time… Lagos is kind of a lawless place. The police are another antagonistic force working against you, along with bandits, thieves, people trying to make a buck—it’s a really raw place.

“At the same time, the people there are really amazing, warm, so full of hope. The fact that this has been able to happen there is all the more amazing because there’s no formal infrastructure for making films. It’s every person for themselves.”

Born in Nigeria and raised in the U.S., Femi Agbayewa saw the Nollywood filmmaking style first-hand when he travelled back to his homeland to work on film crews, and it influenced his own film about the travails of an African immigrant to the U.S. “The work ethic is phenomenal,” he recalls of his exposure to Nollywood filmmaking. “They’re banging out scenes—the number of scenes you see in a day is mind-blowing. Some people might say that affects the quality, but what I saw was the innovation and the creativity. From an indie standpoint, we’re always looking for work. Sometimes we focus on the obstacles instead of saying ‘let’s go out and just do what we can.’”

Documentarian Mallal was equally inspired by the Nollywood style. He cautions viewers against saying “‘These are nothing like the films we know, therefore they’re not good.’ It’s true they make them a lot cheaper, but it’s about seeing what we can learn from them.” The movies, he elaborates, are “epic battles between good and evil, and there’s no subtlety at all. They make bold statements, and those often translate into graphics and effects that seem outlandish to the Western eye. But if you dig deeper, there’s things there we don’t understand. They’re attempts to mediate the traditional and the modern, and that’s what Lagos is all about.”

Mallal also took inspiration from “the idea of hustling, of getting your product out by any means necessary. They find a way to do it, and they make it work. People don’t even watch American films there anymore, and that’s a major revelation. Imagine if that happened here. What would it take to make that happen?”

In Canada, he continues, “People talk about defending culture… [in Nigeria] it wouldn’t even cross people’s minds to think about that. They don’t see the idea of culture or art as being separate from everyday life, and I think we can learn from that too.”

WELCOME TO NOLLYWOOD AND
IN GOD’S COUNTRY SCREEN AT THE
CINÉMADU PARC THIS SUNDAY, OCT. 5.
NOLLYWOOD BABYLON SCREENS
AT THE CINÉMA DU PARC ON FRIDAY,
OCT. 17 AT 7P.M. AND EX-CENTRIS ON
SATURDAY, OCT. 18 AT 1:20P.M.