Nollywood Goes to Oscars with Lionheart

Nollywood: Addressing African Concerns

“A friend of mine described Nollywood as someone performing heart surgery using forks and knives. But the genius of it is that the patient survives… and that’s what we have done with Nollywood. Impossible things have happened with us.”

So says Charles Igwe, the CEO of Nollywood Global Media Group and one of the industry’s early investors. The Nigerian based film industry produces an average of around 2,000 films a year, topping both Hollywood and Bollywood.

Despite production being low-cost, especially when compared with the high budgets of Hollywood, Nollywood films have a strong audience in Nigeria and across the continent. According to Igwe, Nollywood’s success comes from a hunger for African content.

“At the time we started there was nothing in the global spectrum of content that addressed anything African. All the information that came to us was filtered through the big networks like BBC, CNN… It was about famine, corruption – the usual things. And the rest of the space was filled with wildlife from Namibia and Serengeti,” said Igwe.

No Oscars for Nollywood at 2015 Academy Awards

EVEN though a local Oscars selection committee has since February 2014 been constituted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences to select an entry that will best represent Nollywood in the Best Foreign Language Film category for the annual Academy Awards, Nigeria did not feature on the list of 83 countries that have submitted films for consideration in that category of the prestigious award.

Chairman, Nigeria Oscars Selection Committee (NOSC), Chineze Anyaene, confirmed during the week that though the selection committee received a number of entries, none of them, according to her, "met the basic criteria for selection'. The academy insists that entries for the foreign language film category must be feature-length movie produced outside of the U.S. with a predominantly non-English dialogue track and accurate English subtitles. But according to Anyaene who produced and directed the commercially successful movie Ije, most of the entries the committee received were "either in English and some of those that were not in English were not properly subtitled and quite a number of them were lacking in some technical details".

Oscars Recognizes Nollywood for Awards Category

Ahead of the 2015 Oscars, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) has approved a 12-man committee of Nollywood stakeholders, the Nigerian Oscars Selection Committee (NOSC), to consider Nigerian entries for the world's most prestigious awards for films.

Each year, countries with an approved selection committee may submit one film for consideration for the Foreign Language Film Award Oscar; only five films are chosen from all international submissions for Academy members to cast their votes and choose a winning foreign language film.

"This is a great opportunity for Nigeria to have a voice in the international film arena," said Chineze Anyaene, filmmaker and committee chairperson.

The NOSC members comprise of outstanding professionals who have over time proved their mettle as some of the finest in the movie industry. They include Chineze Anyaene, Ngozi Okafor, Olumide Amure, Ramsey Nouah, Kene Mkparu, Emeka Mba, Chioma Ude, Akin Salami, Mildred Okwo, Biola Alabi, Charles Novia and Shaibu Husseini.

According to Academy rules, the members will consider submissions on seven criteria, which are: story, direction, acting, cinematography, sound, music and universal theme.

Shaibu Husseini, another member of the board agrees. "The Nollywood film industry needs to play globally so people will begin to look towards us."