The Nollywood Phenomenon

• Author: Elizabeth March
• Position: WIPO Magazine Editorial Staff, Communications and Public Outreach Division

"We tell our own stories"

Nigeria's burgeoning film industry, now considered the world's third largest after Hollywood and India's "Bollywood," is in a league of its own.

Dubbed Nollywood, the industry is characterized by its prolific output of ultra-low budget films, shot with digital cameras, produced straight to video/DVD format, and sold directly to customers for two or three dollars. For 15 years, largely ignoring the external cinema world, Nollywood has fuelled an insatiable appetite in Africa's most populous country for homegrown films made by Nigerians about Nigerians. The market is expanding as the popularity of the films spreads across Africa, supplying the needs of local television stations and audiences for low-cost entertainment content.

It is an industry made possible by affordable digital technology, and driven by the ingenuity, resourcefulness and keen business sense of Nigeria's people. Production time for an average video-film is often less than two months, from casting through to distribution. Films are shot under conditions that professionals elsewhere would consider impossible, with budgets as little as US$15,000. A film can expect to sell about 50,000 copies, or several hundred thousand if it is a hit. The returns on investment attract ever more hopefuls into the industry, which is now a major employer in parts of the country.

Chris Obi-Rapu's Living in Bondage, released in 1992, is widely credited with having sparked the Nollywood revival out of the ashes of the country's moribund feature film industry. The film's cheap video format, and the bold narration of family melodrama laced with black magic, made it a smash hit, and provided the hugely successful formula for those which followed.

Grass-roots revolution

The Nollywood phenomenon has begun to catch the eye of the world's media and cinema pundits: "The raw energy of the movies - and the flurry in which they are filmed and sold - is a kind of grass-roots creative revolution on a continent where stories have been told for generations but rarely committed to film," wrote Neely Tucker in the Washington Post, inspired by the rare screening in a U.S. movie theater of a Nigerian film, Behind Closed Doors. And the Nigerian industry has itself become the subject of films. This Is Nollywood, by Franco Sacchi and Robert...