Business
Nollywood: Nigeria’s film industy growing fast
Nollywood shoot. PHOTO/Aimee Corrigan
“Nollywood films allow Black people to shine”
Nollywood is the third largest film industry in the world behind Hollywood and Bollywood. Nollywood annually produces over 2,000 movies, and brings in profits of approximately US$250 million per year.
Emerging in the late 1980s, Nollywood depicted stories reflective of everyday life, making them identifiable to its audiences. While still illustrating the crime and anxieties of Nigeria and other African countries, filmmakers nowadays gravitate toward themes that involve moral dilemmas facing modern-day Africans, many of them with overt Christian, Islamic, and evangelical themes, in addition to the depiction of prostitution, romance, a corrupt police force and disease.
Similar to model used by African-American filmmaker Tyler Perry in the states, the films are typically produced at a very modest budget and yield a high return. With an average production rate of US$15,000, Nollywood films often yield up to 10 times that amount in return.
Nollywood filmmakers, eager to use Black American talent in order to broaden their international appeal, say that while the actors might not be able to demand the same paycheck as actors like Denzel Washington would for Safe House or Viola Davis would for The Help, the sky’s the limit on the types of stories they can tell.