In the 1990s, Nigeria suddenly jumped from nowhere on the map of world cinema to third most prolific national producer of movies. Welcome to Nollywood documents the country’s burgeoning movie industry, centered on Nigeria’s sprawling capital, Lagos, It will be released on DVD on Feb. 9.
None of the 2,500 Nigerian movies released each year are likely to come to a cinema near you or even a cinema in Lagos. According to the documentary by filmmaker Jamie Meltzer, virtually everything is released direct to video-- literally VHS in most cases. Most are shot on the fly in a week or less on budgets that couldn’t fund the most modest American indie.
The Lagos vibe is a little like early Hollywood in its most primitive, pre-1920s period. One Nigerian director interviewed for Welcome to Nollywood, Chico Ejiro, cranked out 80 movies and is still a relatively young man. From the snippets shown here, most Nollywood pictures, frankly, are terrible, and serve as a lesson that the “democratization” of cinema wrought by digital technology hasn’t been without its downside. But the motley array of Nigerian martial arts flicks, romance quickies, paranoid political thrillers, dramas of slave times and lurid tales of the supernatural dominate movie viewing not just in Nigeria but also in much of Africa. They speak to the anxieties of their audience.
Welcome to Nollywood also gives evidence that some Nigerian directors are developing ambitions to rise above cheap and fast and make films that tell African stories with greater artistry.
