The secret to Nollywood sweethearts, Olu Jacobs and Joke Silva’s initial success as a couple and professional actors could be just that he gave her class while she gifted him with charm and youthful ardor. That playful equation explains the protracted tango between Nollywood and the movie industry’s merit awards.
To the latter, Nollywood offers glamour; to Nollywood, the awards provide substance or at least an illusion of it. The two elements are ultimately the source of blooming mythology; the industry awards perpetuate the fable that Nigerian actors and actresses are world class; Nollywood in turn, promulgates the fantasy that the fable is true.
In truth, Nollywood’s flirtation with industry awards manifests interestingly even as you read.
Ask Kunle Afolayan. The budding actor and filmmaker cruises to a crescendo of industry merit awards as the days draw nearer to the third edition of the African Magic Viewers’ Choice Awards (AMVCA), which is scheduled to hold on March 7 at the Eko Hotel and Suites, Victoria Island, Lagos. Afolayan heaves with excitement as his dark psychological thriller, October 1, written by Tunde Babalola, scoops 13 nominations, including the highly coveted Best Movie Drama and Best Movie of the Year. This comes in the wake of the movie’s promising performance at the box office in six months. “What we have made from October 1 in Nigeria so far is more than N100 million, but it is not just from cinema box office. We did private screenings, and we’ve done screenings on other platforms,” enthused Afolayan.
An unlikely hero
Afolayan is stoutly built with a beer gut. He speaks with a casual burr and sports a visible scar on his face like a war veteran flaunts a war scar. But Afolayan’s scar is hardly a war scar, it’s the telltale from a car accident and some of his admirers would say it imbues him with a dash of character. Forget character, Afolayan has got charm, a quality elderly movie buffs claim glaringly pales to the magnetism epitomised by his late father, a legendary actor and screen god, Ade Love. That boyish charm pales to an exuberant squall of optimism that characterises the tinseltown upstart’s self-confessed meticulous film culture.
He is quick to distance himself from Nollywood and its streetwise art of guerrilla filmmaking even as he advances in same breadth, his uncompromising attitude to the art and business of film making. Afolayan was born into the family of 1970s’ prolific actor, producer, theatre and film director, late Adeyemi Afolayan a.k.a Ade Love.
The 39-year-old, who quit a career in banking to embrace acting, got his first acting gig in 1998 when Tunde Kelani cast him in his film, Saworoide. His first feature film Irapada, won rave reviews and heralded the arrival of a unique voice in the industry; one that projected from present day and explored the past with stories of myth and legend in Yoruba culture. With his film, The Figurine, Afolayan acquired the right balance; the movie scooped five major awards at the African Movie Academy Awards and experienced tremendous success in local movie theaters.
Yet for all his hopefulness and sunny spells, the economic realities of filmmaking in Nigeria glaringly impedes hopeful lunges at the highest movie standards. The consumer base is huge there are more than a billion Africans, 165 million of them in Nigeria alone. But access to those buyers is controlled by clannish merchants holding forte at the Alaba International Market, the distribution hub of the country’s movie business.
And like Andrew Rice, New York Times columnist aptly puts it, to visit Alaba is to catch a glimpse of entertainment in its Hobbesian state, where few laws restrain profiteers, piracy is rampant and all creative calculations yield to the lowest denominator. The market’s cramped concrete stalls are piled high with video CDs packaged in garish paper envelopes. Men pulling carts laden with boxes jostle through unpaved alleyways, passing under flapping banners advertising new releases like Mama’s Girls and Demonic Attack. Castoff plastic discs, the detritus of digital replication, litter the muddy ground like seashells.
This may not be quite what Jean-Luc Godard had in mind when he recently declared that with digital cameras, “everyone is now an auteur.” But it certainly represents a vision of what the future could hold and not just for Nigeria if the practice of making entertainment ceases to be rewarding to professionals.
Besides Afolayan, very few ambitious practitioners are scoring remarkable achievements by their contributions to the local film industry. For instance, very few people knew Nse Ikpe-Etim until her cameo appearance as an extra in film director, Reginald Ebere’s ‘Venom of Justice.’ One decade later, she re-emerged in the Nigerian movie scene, commanding the attention of the sector’s most virulent critics, courtesy her arresting interpretations thus luring movie enthusiasts to hate her and love her, just as her characters demanded.
Either as the ambitious upstart alongside Ramsey Nouah and Stephanie Okereke in the 2008 flick, Reloaded, the embattled character, Mariam Idoko in Broken, (2012) alongside Kalu Ikeagwu and Bimbo Manuel, or the seasoned and animated “Nse” in Journey to self (2012), Ikpe-Etim captures the subtleties of fiction effortlessly and quite impressively, thus making her simplest interpretations memorable.
Little wonder she received two nominations for Best Actress in a Leading Role at the fifth and eighth Africa Movie Academy Awards (AMAA) for her role in Reloaded and Mr & Mrs respectively; and just recently, she was awarded the 2014 AMVCA for Best Actress in a Drama for playing “Nse” in Journey to Self. Ikpe-Etim’s nominations and recent win no doubt broadens her horizon and improves her chances in the movie sector.
According to her, “I’m happy that when you do work, no matter how little, someone out there sees it and says ‘hang on a minute, we might want to reward her or at least give her a mention because she’s done something…I honestly didn’t know I’d be nominated; it came as a shock that I was nominated. Secondly, I had loads of fights with people because I stayed in character and couldn’t get out…I was still acting it. (Laughs) It was worth it after all.”
Like Ikpe-Etim, Amarachi Onoh is ecstatic about his win at the recently concluded AMVCA.
Onoh, a graduate of the University of PortHarcourt, Rivers State, won the Best New Media: Online Video Award for his film, Mother Tongue. The new category was created to help usher in the arrival of a new generation of African storytellers.
Onoh enthused that the AMVCA has opened up new opportunities to him. “It has given me some kind of leverage to talk to and approach people. It has given me credibility. More people want to work with me and those who I approach are comfortable working with me. AMVCA puts a good stamp on one’s credentials,” he said.
At the backdrop of Afolayan, Onoh and Ikpe-Etim’s success stories, however, festers a sad and gritty reality; the Nigerian movie sector suffers the affliction of a myriad of professional, economic and regulatory bogeys. Most of the movies are dreadful, marred by shoddy production, melodramatic acting and ludicrous plots. Afolayan, 39, is one of a clan of budding and ambitious filmmakers struggling to exceed trendy hackneyed procedures and base productions. The Figurine, his 2009 thriller, was an imaginative leap that established him as a promising talent keen to disconcert a mediocre movie culture. Unlike most Nollywood fare, The Figurine was released in actual theaters, not on cheap discs; the movie played to packed theatres and “Many observers,” claimed, Jonathan Haynes, a movie scholar with extensive works on Nollywood, recently wrote, “have been waiting a long time for this kind of filmmaking, which can take its place in the international arena proudly and on equal terms.”
Nollywood: Birth of a brand name
There is the question of who invented the brand name, Nollywood. For a while, it was assumed that Matt Steinglass coined the name in an article he wrote for the New York Times in 2002. “But we now know that the inventor of the brand name is actually a Japanese American going by the name Norimitsu Onishi, in an article he wrote for the New York Times in 2002, entitled “Step Aside, Los Angeles, Bombay for Nollywood,” noted Professor Femi Okiremuette Shaka of the Department of Theatre Arts, University of Port Harcourt, Port Harcourt, Rivers State.
Two decades since it sprouted from the frayed pavements of Lagos street markets, Nollywood has evolved into the world’s second-largest film industry ahead of Hollywood in terms of the number of annual film productions (which roughly translates to 40 films per week, at an average cost of $40,000 per project), Nollywood has built itself into a $590m industry in just under two decades.
However, the $590 million Nigerian movie industry groans under the weight of mediocrity and piracy. Ayo Makun, a stand-up comedian and tenderfoot film producer, tells his sad story even as he smiles to the bank counting proceeds from his N137 million grossing 30 days in Atlanta.
Makun a.k.a AY, has written an open letter to the Inspector General of Police (IGP), Suleiman Abba, on the pirating of his movie. AY, who produced the new movie 30 Days in Atlanta, urged the IGP in the letter to use the machinery at his disposal to identify and arrest the counterfeiters of his work.
Already, he said that he had contacted the licensed distributors of the movie, Silverbird Film Distribution; the Director General of the National Copyright Commission (NCC), Afam Ezekude and Ahbu ventures of Alaba market. “I have always heard of the risk faced by honest producers and loss of revenue due to the activities of the incessant piracy cabals operating freely, without fear of the law in Nigeria. And within the past few weeks, this has been my experience as I heard of the leak of my movie to various nefarious elements.
“No more should a miscreant be celebrated or allowed to rape intellectual properties of honest hardworking citizens with impunity, while the owner of the property looks on helplessly. No more should movie producers and other intellectual property owners scramble to make the little they can, before the ‘Alaba boys’ get their hands on the content.
“Alaba is part of Nigeria and as such the activities therein ought to be governed by the laws of Nigeria,” he said. AY said that if the IGP fails to curtail piracy, producers would refuse to make more movies for fear of losing out.
The movie, which premiered in the country on Oct. 30, 2014, has since become the highest earning Nigerian movie at the Box Office, with reported gate takings of more than N137 million.
An informal economy
Nollywood survives on an informal economy. However, informal commercial networks rule the local film industry not because the practitioners are conservative traditionalists but because they cling to it because it is the most reliable option they have available. Kabira Khafidipe, an actress, argued that the local industry had to evolve such an informal and dependable system in order to fulfill the needs of individual film makers and the industry. “And it is really paying off. Things have improved over the last few years and Nigeria has become a force to be reckoned with in intercontinental movie sectors. We are going places,” she said.
The video industry has little vertical integration of operations, and is not organised in a Hollywood style studio system. Instead, professional guilds formed by actors, writers, directors, technicians and producers are Nollywood’s primary organisational units. Nollywood’s position in the informal economy means that the industry is not yet able to be as capitalist as it aspires to be. Those who confuse the capitalist aspirations of entrepreneurs with the economic realities plaguing Africa will however, fail to recognise the challenges that Nollywood faces before its entrepreneurs can generate significant capital.
One might also miss Nollywood’s participation in commerce, development and quality of life on the ground in Nigeria as Nollywood’s informal structure places it within traditional social networks in a way that positions producers to interact and engage in exchange with Nigerian communities on their own terms.
The films are hastily shot and then burned onto video CDs, a cheap alternative to DVDs. The saving grace is that most of Nollywood’s output is shot on a minuscule budget. Nollywood productions, including series such as BlackBerry Babes or Lekki Wives, are reportedly filmed in just 10 days and cost some $40,000, yielding notoriously low-end content. “Making money is tough, especially for film-makers who are increasing the budget, paying more attention to the quality, and making movies that can travel,” says Obi Emelonye, a director. “Distribution is hands-down the biggest problem…Solve that, and Nollywood will explode,” he explained.
Online distribution to the rescue
Globally, the film industry is threatened by online distribution, which leads to plummeting DVD sales, dwindling cinema attendance and internet piracy. But Nollywood is hopeful that the internet could be the answer, not the problem.
Streaming services have been operating in Nigeria for several years, but are only now beginning to gather momentum. The biggest of those is iROKOtv, which has made some 5,000 titles available to online audiences. Others such as Pana TV, which secured the rights to stream “Half of a Yellow Sun”, a film based on Chimamanda Adichie’s novel and iBAKATV are expanding fast.
Jason Njoku, the British-Nigerian founder of iROKO, said that when he first started buying streaming rights from Nigerian film-makers four years ago, the industry had almost no concept of online distribution.
Today online portals are a crucial source of cash. iROKO, for instance, pays between $8,000 and $25,000 per film for a set period of time. Film directors like Emelonye often sell to several online platforms. Going online has “absolutely” made business more profitable, he said.
It is also exposing local film-makers to a global audience. iROKO has more viewers in London today than in Nigeria. Caribbean and Latin American audiences also lap up Nollywood films. Witnessing the appetite for such content among diaspora communities, Africa Magic, a pay-TV channel airing African movies and soaps, has also launched a streaming service for Africans living abroad. So far, video-on-demand services have struggled to create much of a market at home, where power is intermittent and the vast majority of the population does not have access to a computer.
What the foregoing shows is that Nollywood is a vibrant and world acclaimed new film culture which has promoted Nigeria’s cultural heritage globally. However, it would be wrong to leave the impression that all is well with Nollywood. Besides the well known issue of quality, which over the years has greatly improved, the greatest impediment to the growth and development of Nollywood is the issue of distribution.
To solve the problems related to lack of appropriate distribution system, the new National Distribution and Exhibition Framework (NDEF) was drawn up and launched by the National Film and Video Censors Board (NFVCB) on Wednesday, February 8, 2007, at the Sheraton Hotel & Towers, Lagos. Part of the reasons given by Emeka Mba, the Director- General of the NFVCB for establishing the new distribution framework, is the need to align the video film industry with other sectors of the National economy.
Getting the distribution right is a panacea to taking the industry to the next level of growth. It will provide assurance to the banking sector, on the basis of which loans can be provided for high value productions. At the backdrop of these tedious realities, filmmakers in Nigeria jostle with peers across the African continent for recognition and prize rewards. By seeking rewards, filmmakers seek personal fulfillment and satisfaction of the prerequisites of mass audience appeal.
The existence of industry awards no doubt increases filmmakers’ chances and a field’s breadth. The role of the AMVCA and AMAA in Nollywood, for instance, implies that biopics in which the historical protagonist overcomes oppression can coexist with popcorn movies about pop culture in a fever-pitch dash for recognition and rewards.