Canal+ and Netflix Eye Nollywood Opportunities

(By Will McBain) – Canal+ and Netflix Eye Nollywood Opportunities

Increased foreign investment in the wake of the purchase of a Nollywood studio by Canal+ could be a game-changer for Nigeria’s already thriving film industry. Will McBain looks at the prospects for a sector targeted to make $1bn in export revenue by 2020.

Nollywood has begun the biggest financial makeover in its history with this summer’s acquisition of Lagos-based production house ROK film studios by French media giant Canal+.

The studio was bought from Africa’s largest subscription-based video-on-demand company IROKOtv, whose founder Jason Njoku called the sale the “largest media deal in West African history”. Actress and producer Mary Njoku – Jason Njoku’s wife – founded ROK studios and will stay on as director general under the Canal+ acquisition.

Nollywood is Too Big to Ever Die

"Nollywood is too big to ever die: it is the third [now second] largest film industry in the world, as we
like to keep repeating, and it will eventually be seen as one of the world's major film cultures. The story of its beginnings ought to be told with an appropriate level of depth, detail, and accuracy. One hopes that Nollywood will evolve into dazzling glory impossible to imagine at present, but the remarkable extent to which it holds on to and repeats themes, stories, and aesthetics suggests that a lot that will remain fundamental was laid down at or near the very beginning, that some of the early works will remain as classics, and that whatever the future of film in Nigeria turns out to be, it will be recognizable as an extension of what has already been created. To an extraordinary degree, [Kenneth] Nnebue's Living in Bondage (1992), the film that started the Nigerian video boom, contains the seeds of almost everything that followed."

Jonathan Haynes, 2010, 15

"What Is to Be Done?: Film Studies and Nigerian and Ghanaian Videos,"

in Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-first Century: Art Films and the 

Nollywood Video Revolution, ed. Mahir Saul and Ralph A. Austen

Nollywood: The Genesis, the Motivation

Okechukwu Ogunjiofor was a co-producer, with Kenneth Nnebue, of Nollywood's foundational movie, Living in Bondage. He actually sold the idea of the movie to Nnebue, who financed the film, becoming it executive producer. He became popularly known as Paulo, a character in Living in Bondage.

Nigeria: Nollywood's Tale of the Middle Class

Want a feel-good story about an African middle class with a Hollywood ending? It is set in Nigeria, the continent’s biggest country by population, brashest by reputation and ballsiest by self-conception.

Outside its borders, Nigeria is defined by Boko Haram hashtag campaigns, imploding mega-churches and the occasional piece about political dysfunction. But as an entity (“country” does not quite fit the description), led by the unloved Goodluck Jonathan and his People’s Democratic Party (PDP), it marches towards a general election in 2015, and into a future without certainties or precedents.

Inside, the mise en scene is somewhat more complicated. No state that is home to 170m souls can ever be properly united; it will always be a nation of nations. That is certainly the case with Nigeria, which is riven by the tenth parallel, the line of latitude that separates the mostly Muslim north from the largely Christian south. So many of Nigeria’s problems, to say nothing of its indefatigable energy, are generated by this division. But as the energy increases, it becomes more unstable at the core. Regional observers worry that Nigeria will eventually explode into a cluster of Balkanised mini-states.