Of Nollywood, Actors, and Paucity of Acting

(By Immanuel James Ibe-Anyanwu) - Every man has his own vanity. … If I were to choose between the story and the prose of a good book, I’d choose the latter—the juice. With movies, I’d choose the acting over the story. Good acting is when you cannot tell the actor apart from the character; when acting is so real as if a secret camera were hidden to catch regular people leading their normal lives—like when you watch “24” and wonder if those guys were actors, or real CTU agents doing their thing and getting filmed.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind—a memoir, now a film. Chiwetel Ejiofor is Trywell Kamkwamba, the Malawian father whose teenage son, William Kamkwamba, exploited the wind and generated electricity, solving drought and famine. A father who, though initially, even fiercely reluctant, finally gave his only bicycle to be cannibalized for a schoolboy’s dream.

             Ejiofor is a poor farmer and there’s no single doubt about it: his energy, looks, emotions. So dissolved into his character is he that, at first, I fail to recognize him. His home, the village, the people—nothing seems like it’s a movie. His wife, Agnes—played by the popular Senegalese actress, Aïssa Maïga—looks, in every detail, the image you know about that kind of woman in your village.

Nollywood: The Benefits of Quality Productions

(By YomiKazeem) - Nollywood’s focus on movie quality over quantity is starting to reap box office returns

          The global claim to fame for Nigeria’s Nollywood movie industry has typically been its volume of production, ranked behind only India’s Bollywood.

          While that emphasis on low-budget, high-volume production saw Nollywood movies become hugely popular at home and across Africa and the diaspora, it also fostered low standards. But the past decade has seen a new generation filmmakers shift focus from quantity to quality—a move that’s yielding increased international recognition and has seen Nollywood movies increasingly become a big draw for audiences at local cinemas.

          Most emblematic of that trend perhaps is The Wedding Party, a 2017 romantic comedy, which became the first Nollywood movie to gross over 400 million naira ($1 million) at local cinemas. Its sequel, released only a year later, did even better. The trend of high earnings have largely continued as Nigerian movies are on track to record gross cinema earnings of over a billion naira ($2.7 million) once again last year after first doing so in 2016.