Genevieve Nnaji, Lionheart, & Good Old Nollywood

Lionheart, a Genevieve Nnaji film, a true Nigerian home video-styled film, has captured the world—no mende-mende added, just same old simple Nigerian Enugu-based Nollywood’s beautifully told story by same old Nollywood veterans – Pete Edochie, Onyeka Onwenu, Nkem Owoh (I mean the same old Osuofia, nothing added), Ngozi Ezeonu, Zebrudaya, Kanayo O. Kanayo and loads of the same old Nollywood faces based in Enugu. And they made it to the international stage, in a jammed cinema hall in the big city of Toronto, with a mixed audience, seventy-five percent whites. The audience laughed when necessary, cried when necessary, and at the end everyone agreed unanimously that they all thoroughly enjoyed the truly made-in-Nigeria movie. Great sound, beautiful pictures, and of course fast paced cutting that really did the magic. Like I said during the third screening of the film at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), this is our style. Thanking Genevieve for her audacity in sustaining our original story pattern and presenting it just as raw as we always did before they [the oversabis] came and told us we were doing nonsense, that the foreign markets and distributors wouldn't touch us with a ten-mile pole. Now I can say, dear oversabis, Genevieve Nnaji's Obiagu: Lionheart has proven you all wrong. Connections and those she knows may have played a part in securing her much celebrated deal with Netflix, but my joy is that it’s Nollywood that was bought and that gives me so much joy.

Lancelot Oduwa Imasuen

Film Director/Producer

"New Nollywood": Raising the Artistic Bar

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.