Have you ever heard of Nollywood?

Posted by Lucio Maurizi on September 19, 2008 under Documentary, Nollywood | Comments are off for this article

We all grew up with Hollywood. Most of us have heard of Bollywood, but do you know Nollywood?

If you’ve never heard of it, you should know that it’s the third largest producer of feature films in the world after the American and the Indian ones.

Although the birth of what now is Nollywood is uncertain, what is clear is that it is an extremily successful industry ever since the release of the first movie in 1992: the video “Living in Bondage”,

a movie with a tale of the occult that was an instant and huge-selling success. It wasn’t long before other would-be producers jumped on the bandwagon. – thisisNollywood.com

The movies created by Nollywood producers and directors, take place in a very familiar enviroment for the Nigerian people, telling stories belonging to the reality of an everyday life that people can understand and easily  relate to.

What makes Nollywood so different from Hollywood, though? Well the producers as well as the directors and the other artists have to face issues that would sound unreal for the big LA productions: snarled traffic, pollution, decaying infrastructure, and frequent power outages. Star actors, usually work at several projects at the same time and its not rare for them to be extremely late or absent at the shooting. Often local thugs extort money from the production before allowing them to shoot on their “turf”.

Not exactly what pops in mind when you think about big movie productions.

But, despite all this, Nollywood has managed to grow to a 250milion$ a year industry, creating jobs and art continuously. The films, usually shot in a 10-15 days period, with a budget of 15.000$ per film are developed and distributed thoughout the country at a number of fifty a week. The price for the dvds is only two usd each, which makes the movies affordable, which creates a big profit for the producers, involving the audiences in stories very far from the westerns adventures to which they can hardly care about.

“We are telling our own stories in our own way,” director Bond Emeruwa says. “That is the appeal both for the filmmakers and for the audience.”

The last few years have seen the growing popularity of Nollywood films among African diaspora in both Europe and America. – thisisNollywood.com

You wanna know more about nollywood in a fun and educative way? Take a look at the documentary “This is Nollywood” (http://www.thisisnollywood.com/film.htm), produced by Robert Caputo and Franco sacchi and directed by Franco Sacchi.