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| L-R: Ose Oyamendan (2nd L), Kemi Adetiba, and Banky W |
When you live in Los
Angeles, you often feel you have seen everything. You have most likely gone
through an earthquake or two. You have seen men become women and women become
men. You have seen stars rise and fall. You have eaten food you can not even
pronounce. You have been on a roller coaster through life and, sometimes, you
do not know what is real and what is make belief.
Last week, the
city saw what it had not seen before, not in this light. Nigeria was in town.
“We’re gonna rock
this town the way it’s not been rocked in a long time,” beamed
Nigerian-American filmmaker Ose Oyamendan as he strolled in his Ankara shirt
under the mild afternoon sun into a meeting with the big wigs at The Egyptian
Theatre on Tuesday afternoon.
A few hours later,
the online version of the prestigious Los Angeles Times spilled the beans on
the unsuspecting city when it announced, “Watch Out Hollywood, Nollywood is
coming to town”. This is the closest you get to a cultural coup. Nigeria, long
bashed in the media for scandals, corruption and fraud, was getting a public
rebranding, thanks to the Nollywood In Hollywood event.
The headline lit up
social media. Kemi Adetiba, the queen of Nigeria’s box office whose film, KING
OF BOYS, was selected for screening posted a blurb of the newspaper headline on
her Instagram page with a simple line, “Hey mommy… Hey daddy… Guess who just
got featured in the @latimes”. Good news must travel fast. Within an hour, the
news had been viewed or shared over a million times on social media. It would
expand to over ten million in the next few days.
