Nigeria's Nollywood: The World's Third Cinema

Nigerian director Bond Emeruwa is used to difficulties on his set, but they’re not the types of difficulties you’d expect. While shooting his most recent feature, an action-thriller called “Check Point,” Bond and his crew juggled power outages, missing actors, broken-down vehicles and makeshift pyrotechnics. At one point, the noise from a mosque during Salah was loud enough to halt filming on location altogether. While his crew loaded gasoline into the generator for the second time that week, Emeruwa was still as cool and confident as ever. “In Nollywood, we don’t count the walls,” he says. “We’ve learned to climb them.”

Truer words were seldom spoken. Directors in Hollywood and Bollywood, currently the first and second largest film industries in the world, hardly have to worry whether an ambulance will get stuck in the dirt and stall during their final day of shooting. But like the title of Franco Sacchi’s and Robert Caputo’s new documentary says, “This Is Nollywood.”

The film was screened earlier this month at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts during their annual African Film Festival. It follows Emeruwa through the completion of “Check Point.” Emeruwa’s film was shot in 11 days, a staggering number in an industry where films are usually shot in five. Sacchi, an African-born member of the faculty at Boston University’s Center for Digital Imaging Arts (CDIA), spoke at the screening and said the documentary tried to capture digital evolution in the making. “The mission of the CDIA is to explore digital technology throughout the world, which is exactly what Nollywood is,” he says.

According to the documentary, the Nigerian film industry, now third in size behind India and the United States, has a revenue approaching $250 million per year and produces about 1,000 films annually on a budget of about $15,000 per film.

Once the film begins, it’s easy to see how this kind of cost cutting is possible. Throughout Sacchi and Caputo’s work, all signs point to an industry whose demand has vastly outgrown its resources. Clips from finished films have the reel quality of cheap commercials on your local community access station; cuts from frame to frame are sloppy, the picture is grainy and the audio is poor. Several of the other Nollywood filmmakers interviewed claim that the revival of the VHS camera to shoot their movies was essential to the survival of the industry, because, in a country whose average income is less than $1 per day, there simply isn’t the money for big-budget films.

Associate producer Aimee Corrigan explained that the industry’s lack of polish is the result of a practical application vacuum in Nigerian film education. “Some universities have theory only, but this is really the problem, is a lack of training,” she said.

But that’s part of what makes the people in “This Is Nollywood” so inspiring. Sacchi and Caputo go as far as to compare Nollywood to the Italian neo-realism movement of the ’40s, and that analogy isn’t so far off. For better or for worse, these movies are for the people. The directors, especially Emeruwa, seem firmly decided on capturing stories that portray life in Nigeria and that convey a message about society in their country. “Check Point,” which tells the story of innocent men gunned down by bad cops at a police checkpoint, was actually conceived in reaction to the appointment of a local police chief, who promised to eliminate corruption in his organization.

And Nigerian filmmakers have an overwhelming sense of pride in both individual and national accomplishment. While the high demand for film owes a lot to products from India and the West, Nollywood has evolved into a uniquely Nigerian enterprise. “I cannot tell the white man’s story,” Emeruwa says.

Temitope O. Abereoje, a student at Harvard Business School and a native of Nigeria, eschews comparisons to American films. “The quality is not the best, but it’s not the quality that matters, it’s telling a story,” he says. “It’s about what’s going on around the people, the community.”

Abereoje’s favorite Nollywood actress, Omotola Ekeinde—whose breakout role as a pregnant sickle-cell patient in 1995’s “Mortal Inheritance” spurred a string of subsequent hits and even a pop album—exemplifies some of the new opportunities for women that have sprouted along with Nollywood.

Tackling distinctly African themes like the proliferation of AIDS and religious tension between Christians and Muslims, Nollywood is provoked by and serves to provoke its audience­—no matter how restrictive that audience may be. Following the screening of “This Is Nollywood,” Corrigan described the subsequent success of “Check Point” and its curious reception in northern Nigeria, where the “Calawood” film collective produces more conservative films for the predominately Muslim community there: “The Censor Board’s blurb on the cover of ‘Check Point’ reads: ‘The best movie we’ve ever censored.’”

—Staff writer Ryan J. Meehan can be reached at rmeehan@fas.harvard.edu