By his own estimates, Lancelot Oduwa Imasuen has
directed somewhere between 150 and 200 movies over the course of his 20-year
career — including hits like “Games Women Play,” “Last Burial” and “Behind
Closed Doors,” which have made him one of the most prolific directors in the
Nigerian film industry, popularly known as Nollywood.
But Imasuen tends to distance himself from his early,
mercenary years, when producers would approach him with shoestring budgets and
shoddy scripts for movies he might have shot in just four days. Today he
produces and directs his own films. “I wouldn’t even have the time to be as
prolific as I used to be,” he said recently, while discussing his latest movie,
“Invasion 1897.”
An epic tale about the British Army’s ransacking of the
ancient West African kingdom of Benin, “Invasion” was a labor of love that took
Imasuen close to four years to produce. Ten years ago, the movie’s
million-dollar budget would have been enough to make a movie like “Games Women
Play” and 24 sequels. But like many of his peers, who have watched shrinking investments
and rampant piracy hobble their industry, Imasuen is gambling that big-budget,
big-screen blockbusters will breathe fresh life into Nollywood.
“If ‘Invasion’ can make back its money, then rest
assured that production is going to come up in Nigeria,” he said with
characteristic swagger.
It is an uncertain time for Nollywood, the homegrown
movie industry whose baroque tales of fast money, gunplay, witchcraft and
amorous treachery have captivated audiences for more than two decades. Once a
fledgling film biz built around low-budget home movies sold on VHS tapes, the
industry has grown into a $5 billion juggernaut, which UNESCO credited in a 2006 study as
being the second-most prolific movie industry on the planet, ahead of Hollywood
and behind only India’s Bollywood.
But since then, the numbers have been in steady decline,
according to Don Nkems, of the Association of
Nollywood Core Producers (ANCOP), which estimates that the industry’s
production peaked at more than 2,600 films in 2008. Even UNESCO, in its most recent
report on the global film business, criticized the industry’s “semi-professional/informal
productions” as it downgraded Nollywood’s output. In the U.N. agency’s roundup
of the most prolific film industries on the planet, Nigeria didn’t even crack
the top 10 list.
Undeterred, Nigerian filmmakers have gotten bolder,
making movies on increasingly bigger budgets, while at the same time hoping to
raise the artistic bar for an industry whose quantity hasn’t always translated
into quality. Having conquered a country and a continent, they’re now looking
to go global.
Along with splashy Lagos premieres, new films are
increasingly getting the red-carpet treatment in such diaspora hot spots as
London, Houston and New York. (Imasuen himself had just returned from a U.S.
tour.) In this year’s “30 Days in
Atlanta,” a romantic comedy by the Nigerian actor-director Robert
Peters, Nollywood icons Ramsey Nouah and Desmond Elliot share the marquee with
American stars Lynn Whitfield and Vivica Fox.
Yet for all its gains, a movement that’s been sometimes
dubbed the New Nigerian Cinema, or New Nollywood, is facing some of the same
old problems as the industry it’s trying to supplant.
“When everybody finishes applauding,” asked Imasuen, “how
do we sell the film?”
For all its shortcomings, the old Nollywood model was an
efficient moneymaking machine. Razor-thin budgets allowed even modestly
successful titles to turn a tidy profit; for Imasuen, it wasn’t uncommon for a
movie made on a $40,000 budget to rake in $300,000 from VCD sales — which he
would quickly plow into more productions.
At the industry’s core is a Byzantine distribution
network, centered in Lagos’ chaotic Alaba market, which manages to swiftly get
new releases on shelves — and in the hands of the country’s ubiquitous street
hawkers — even in Nigeria’s most far-flung cities. In a country whose
government is often seen as a cabal of bungling kleptocrats, Nollywood has
offered a textbook vision of free-market efficiency.
But the market is starting to change. Piracy has eroded
the foundations of DVD distribution; according to the World Bank’s estimates,
90 percent of the DVDs in circulation in Nigeria are illegal copies, with new
releases enjoying just a two-week window before pirated versions flood the
market.
“The law about piracy in Nigeria is a toothless bulldog,”
said Nkems, of ANCOP. “People are losing millions every day.”
While the government has done little to clamp down on
piracy, critics say it’s stumbled in other areas as well. A $200 million film
fund was launched by the federal government in 2010 to great fanfare, but few
filmmakers have managed to tap into it. Many argue the fund was part of a broader plan by
incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan to rally influential
filmmakers and Nollywood stars ahead of his re-election campaign. (Responding
to their criticism, the president announced a
separate, smaller fund last year.)
There was also the government’s ill-fated gambit in 2007
to streamline the film industry’s distribution system. In a business that often
relies on personal relationships and handshake agreements instead of auditable
paper trails, the tighter regulations scared off investors. Many of the
powerful producers controlling the purse strings in Alaba — a cartel that Nkems
says controls up to 90 percent of the industry — began steering their money
toward other business ventures instead.
For the filmmaker Kunle Afolayan, who has emerged in
recent years as Nigerian cinema’s leading light, making movies seems to require
not an auteur’s touch but a magician’s sleight of hand.
“There’s no way I can recoup $2 million from the
Nigerian market using the present distribution structure,” said Afolayan,
referring to the budget for his latest movie, “October 1.”
The son of the legendary filmmaker Ade Love, as well as
a former banker, Afolayan has shown a nimble hand when it comes to balancing
the books. Product placements, he said, can finance up to 30 percent of a film’s
budget — the plot of Afolayan’s “Phone Swap” hinges on two
characters accidentally switching BlackBerrys — while corporate clients such as
the Standard Chartered bank and the oil company Oando pay a premium to host
private screenings of newly released films. Then there are the deals with
pay-TV networks and free-to-air broadcasters across the continent, as well as
Afolayan’s recent talks with Netflix about the rights to “October 1.”
Many Nigerian filmmakers point to the growing importance
of online VOD platforms, especially as they try to reach foreign audiences. But
in a country where Internet penetration is still under 40 percent,
few expect digital disruptors to have the impact they’ve had on American
entertainment anytime soon. Instead, it’s in brick-and-mortar movie theaters
that Nollywood has its biggest stake — a trend mirrored in other developing
nations, such as China,
where construction is trying to keep pace with a surging demand for an
old-fashioned moviegoing experience.
“It’s about building the culture,” said Ayo Sewanu,
general manager of Silverbird
Cinemas, part of the Silverbird Group, which opened Nigeria’s first
modern cinema in 2004. “There are huge opportunities to expand.”
By the end of the year, Nigeria will have just 23 movie
theaters in a nation of almost 170 million — a figure that points to the
untapped potential for a country with a young population and a rapidly growing
middle class. Still, that’s more than twice the number the country had just two
years ago, and more theaters generating more ticket sales means an exponential
increase in the profits a film can make.
“The moment we have a hundred cinemas in Nigeria, a
Nigerian movie can gross $2 million in the first week,” said Afolayan. “We have
the numbers.”
In some ways, the country is coming full circle. For
decades Nigeria had a thriving moviegoing culture, with audiences packing into
colonial-era theaters to watch spaghetti Westerns, Bollywood musicals and kung
fu flicks from Hong Kong. A local industry began to grow in the 1960s and ’70s,
with celebrated filmmakers like Ade Love, Hubert Ogunde and Moses Olaiya —
popularly known by his stage name, Baba Sala — predating the birth of
Nollywood, often touring the country with just a single celluloid print of
their films.
But when the Nigerian economy tumbled in the 1980s,
culminating in the devaluation of the naira, the cost of producing movies
soared. Local filmmakers suddenly found themselves out of work, while growing
insecurity made many people fearful to leave the house at night. Soon the
theaters began shutting down; many were converted into evangelical churches.
In the 15 years since the end of military rule in
Nigeria, though, the economy has boomed. While insecurity, as evidenced by the
uprising of armed group Boko Haram, still poses a threat, stability has taken
hold across much of the country. Shopping malls — complete with brand-new movie
theaters — are rising.
This month Filmhouse
Cinemas, which began operating in 2012, will open the first
multiplex in Kano, northern Nigeria’s commercial capital, just weeks after an attack on
that city’s central mosque claimed more than a hundred lives. The
move is both a testament to financial acumen — at an estimated $17 billion, Kano state’s
economy is as big as Botswana’s — and a testimony to the
resilience for which Nigerians are known.
It’s an encouraging sign, too, that for Nollywood — both
new and old — the show will go on.
“Nigerians are not afraid …
to tell their stories,” said the veteran filmmaker Mahmood Ali Balogun, who was
raised in Kano. “Either good or bad.”
Source: Christopher Vourlias, Aljazera America
No comments:
Post a Comment