Inside Nigeria’s Prolific Film Industry

By Deidre McPhillips

It’s a classic love story: girl loves boy, boy hurts girl, another boy saves the day. But in the movie “Flower Girl,” friends fawn over “African chic” fashion and party-goers ask the band to play “a traditional beat.”

It’s a Nollywood film.

Nollywood, the term that refers to Nigeria’s film industry, is the second-largest in the world in terms of volume. Some 2,500 films are produced annually, well ahead of Hollywood and second only to India’s Bollywood.

Often, these movies are completed in a week with a budget of no more than $20,000.

“It’s born out of passion. We are using what we have to tell our stories and get it out there,” says Michelle Bello, director of “Flower Girl” and founder of publishing company Blu Star Entertainment. She used her parents’ house as the set for a number of scenes in “Flower Girl.” And her life savings to make her first film, “Small Boy.”

In 2014, “Flower Girl” was selected as one of 10 films featured in NollywoodWeek Paris, an annual film festival founded by Serge Noukoué a year earlier to bring what he calls “the best of the best of what Nollywood has to offer to one of the world’s cultural capitals.”

At first, expectations were low. “People maybe came with the intention of laughing at the movies, thinking they would be so bad it would be funny,” Noukoué says.

After all, worries Bello has had while filming – like a camcorder battery dying while filming the climax of the film and gang violence on set – are not often present while shooting Hollywood blockbusters.

But for Noukoué, it’s about time there was “more talk about the movies coming out of Nigeria and less talk about the conditions in which they were made.”

“Flower Girl” has gone on to garner critical acclaim in international film festivals from Ghana to Toronto and a licensed cinema release in the United Kingdom, an important step for Nollywood’s maturing image.

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Nollywood was born out of a society’s need to tell its stories and share them. When the industry started to take shape in the early 1990s, the nation was still getting its footing with democracy. The framework and conditions to form a proper industry did not exist.

“It developed itself, policed itself and emerged as a global force to be reckoned with,” says Ruth Okediji, a law professor at the University of Minnesota Law School and leading scholar of international intellectual property law. “Other nations create laws to stimulate creativity. Here you have a country that can’t stop itself, almost despite itself.”

Fueled by an established culture of creativity – Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka are two examples – and the large audience in a nation of 175 million and a diaspora population of millions more, Nollywood took off.

Ironically, the same “longstanding ‘informal’ structure” and practices that initially helped establish the industry organically – like low-cost straight-to-DVD films – “now inhibit future domestic and international growth,” according to a 2014 report from the United States International Trade Commission.

An estimated $1 billion is lost to piracy each year, with bootleg copies of a film often hitting the streets within hours of its release for a fraction of the price. The World Bank estimates that for every 10 Nigerian movies sold, only one is a legitimate sale.

But if Nigeria’s film industry is to be summed up in one word, it would be resilient. And the $3 billion industry that employs some 1 million people – the second most in the country after agriculture – is finally getting some of the attention it’s due.

The Nigerian Copyright Commission is working to reform a law that governs the ways in which creative people, filmmakers and otherwise, can be compensated for their art and intellectual property. The law has remained static for decades, and according to Okediji, this is a chance to shape the cultural advancement of the country and Nigeria’s global position.

“It’s a new information age, and the government has to be future-minded,” she says. “There has to be a clear vision. The branding campaign will be critical.”

In addition to a revamped copyright law, other factors are coming together to help set the stage for Nollywood’s financial renaissance.

The nation, and continent, are due for a shift in broadcast signal from analog to digital, a change that will help filmmakers be more strategic about their content and the audiences they market to, according to Dayo Ogunyemi, CEO of distribution firm 234 Films.

“The digital switch-over promises a leveling of the playing field in terms of licenses,” he says. “When selling your work to distributors, you’re not wondering if you have the capacity to reach people, you’re now wondering do I have the programming and product to appeal to a demographic.”

The World Bank, Nigerian government and a number of private international organizations have donated millions to the industry in recent years, and the number of groups that recognize Nollywood as a strategic sector continue to grow.

Nollywood actors participated in national Ebola awareness campaigns on social media, something that Dr. Egbe Osifo-Dawodu, a former adviser for the World Bank, says probably helped keep deaths from the disease low in the country. The Nigerian Army has also agreed to collaborate with filmmakers to challenge negative civilian perceptions and raise awareness on the dangers the Islamic extremist group Boko Haram presents.

As actor Blossom Chukwujekwu overlooks capital city Lagos from a balcony in “Flower Girl,” he remarks about the city, “it’s not meant to be here, but it is. And it’s growing and thriving. That means something.”

It’s a sentiment that Nollywood knows all too well.