This is Nollywood (2007)

Directed by: Franco Sacchi | 56 minutes | documentary

After Hollywood and Bollywood, there is now Nollywood, Nigeria’s thriving film industry. Nigerian filmmakers are shooting their prints at breakneck speed and with minimal budgets. In just 13 years, Nollywood has grown into a $250 million-a-year industry that makes a living for thousands of people, making it the third largest film industry in the world. This success has two main ingredients: Nigerian entrepreneurship and the advancement of digital technology. In the late 1980s, Lagos and other major African cities were overrun with crime. People no longer dared to take to the streets, there was general unrest in the country, with the result that cinemas suffered losses and had to close their doors. Videos from the US and India were only slightly appreciated by the public; people preferred to see stories they knew and actors they could identify with. Clever producers took the plunge and a new phenomenon was born!

The documentary ‘This Is Nollywood’ (2007) tells the story of the Nigerian film industry. The rise of the video signaled a revolution that enabled Africans to convey their folk tales and legends to African audiences with limited resources. Although there is hardly any money available and people depend on various incalculable factors, Nigerian directors manage to produce five hundred to a thousand films a year. The videos and DVDs are sold across the continent and Nollywood actors are stars from Ghana to Zambia. In ‘This is Nollywood’ we get a glimpse behind the scenes of this multimillion-dollar industry, when we follow acclaimed director Bond Emeruwa in the making of the action film ‘Check Point’ (2007). He has just nine days to do it (which is said to be a lot for a Nollywood movie!) and is armed with just a digital camera, a few lights and a paltry $20,000 budget. There is no studio; everything is done on location. During the shooting of what is to become the ‘film of the year’, he therefore faces challenges that are hard to imagine in Hollywood.

For example, the electricity goes out, they are extorted by street gangs, the protagonist has to wait a few days and half a day is literally washed away by the pouring rain. Typical of the director’s and his production team’s impotence is the scene in which the shooting comes to a standstill for almost a day because of the incessant sermon coming from the loudspeakers of a nearby mosque. It turns out to be Ramadan, with the result that the sermons continue for hours. But directors like Bond are not deterred by this: “In Nollywood we don’t count the walls. We learn how to climb them.” Some of the founders of Nollywood, including veteran Emmanuel France, say that they use the films not only to entertain people with recognizable stories and situations, but also see it as a task to educate the people. ‘Check Point’, for example, deals with corrupt cops, but AIDS and women’s rights are also topics that are regularly discussed. The idea behind Nollywood is therefore not purely commercial. The main thing is that the typical Nigerian identity is seeping through. Bond: “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.”

The Italian-American director of ‘This is Nollywood’, Franco Sacchi, became fascinated by the Nigerian film world and decided to make a documentary about it that gave the western world an insight into the inventive African directors and producers who are rowing with the oars that they have. . Sacchi deliberately chose to only allow the Nigerians to speak and to refrain from commenting. In doing so, he clearly responds to Nollywood’s philosophy, to let Africans tell their story in their own way. He also does this in an honest, accurate and quite intimate way. People are all too aware that the quality of the films produced in Nollywood leaves something to be desired. But it’s not about quality yet, says producer Peace Anyiam Fiberesima. The comparison with the work of the Senegalese Ousmane Sembene, who is embraced by critics from all over the world, therefore does not hold. Nollywood movies are movies for the people, not for an intellectual minority, nor for the West. A statement that is reinforced by Sacchi, in his honest way of filming.

‘This is Nollywood’ opens the eyes of Western audiences to a gigantic film industry whose existence has long been a closely guarded secret to most Europeans and Americans. It is astonishing how the Nigerian film makers get stuck in their project and are not fooled by the countless unpredictable circumstances they encounter. The result is impressive: around a thousand films a year, all of which are authentically Nigerian. Because, say several interviewees, thanks to the film, people are proud to be Nigerian again. Franco Sacchi was wise to just let his central figure, director Bond Emeruwa, do his thing. It provides authentic, fascinating pictures of a special multi-million dollar industry that has long been hidden from us Westerners.