No Place for Nollywood at festivals

Dar es Salaam. Nigeria’s Nollywood is considered to be the biggest film industry in Africa, one that comes only second to India’s Bollywood and Hollywood internationally.

It is an industry that now employs over one million people in Nigeria in the different chains of production according to various reports.

The numbers don’t lie as they have taken over in most countries especially in sub-Saharan Africa.

 DSTV has over six channels which exclusively show Nigerian films to the rest of Africa.

Television stations across the continent are saturated with Nigerian content as their stars have with time become an embodiment of celebrity lifestyle.

They live large, talk big during their outings in Lagos and elsewhere, in fact, some have even propelled themselves to political power due to their roles in the films.

From Cape Town to Cairo, most of what is known of Nigeria as a country today has been disseminated through Nollywood. 

This sweeping popularity unfortunately isn’t reflected during  several film festivals on the continent. 

At the just concluded Zanzibar international Film Festival, there was little or no attention paid to the industry’s Big brother.

This must be worrying in a way or two because this was not an isolated incident given the fact that even at the Fespaco, where there was a strong push, none of these films took home an award. 

ZIFF’s festival director Prof Martin Mhando in an interview with the Beat said the primary reason why they don’t feature Nigerian films is due to the fact that they don’t submit their productions.

“In the last three years we have not received any films from Nollywood which is the main criteria for a film to be featured at a festival,” says Prof Mhando. According to him, despite a strong local market for the films in Tanzania and the rest of East Africa, the market is on the verge of collapsing.

“Most of these people can readily get these films on TV so they don’t find the essence of buying the films like it used to be in the past,” he notes. Even with strong attributes such as great sound and cinematography the quality of the stories are weak.“There is the predictability element of the story line and that gets boring when the audience can easily tell direction that the plot is going to take,” says Prof Mhando.

Prof Mhando’s view is supported by South African film maker Ndaba Ka Ngwane whose film won two awards at the ZIFF three years ago.

According to him festivals use different criteria when vetting films which are different from what the public eye gets to see. Ironically at the Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Awards in March 2016, Nigerian and Ghanaian productions dominated the awards podium.

And there are some who believe that Nollywood doesn’t represent the whole of the Nigerian film industry despite the fact that it has a large share of the output. From the look of things, there are even some Nigerians who don’t seem to be at peace with what is happening in their own backyard. Most Nigerians either love or hate Nollywood, with not too many occupying the middle ground. In primary school, children play clapping games while singing songs about Living in Bondage, considered the first Nollywood blockbuster, and the film that launched the Nigerian cinema industry.  However, as the industry grew, parents began to forbid their children to watch Nigerian movies due to the abundant depictions of rituals or “juju”.  Still Nollywood continued its ascent, and it is not until when a Nigerian goes outside that he realises how much of an influence Nollywood has.

Perhaps Nollywood is so influential because of its shows of wealth, which many living in poverty aspire to, while simultaneously reflecting the realities and challenges of ordinary people as it imparts one moral message or another. 

But while many criticise the industry for its obsession with witchcraft, there’s been a lot less criticism about the way in which women are portrayed and treated in these movies.

 And when people discuss the female characters, the focus is largely on how scantily dressed they are, and what a bad influence they are on young women, something that critics in Tanzania seem to have borrowed as well. If Nollywood is a reflection of Nigerian society, then what it reveals doesn’t say much about how Nigerians view women. 

Nollywood movies feature heavy doses of sexism that even the least feminist Nigerian is likely to pick up on. 

In movies such as Blackberry Babes, women are depicted as cold and two-timing, always in search of a rich man or sugar daddy. Here it is more of an attempt at creating a world in which men are seemingly oppressed by women who use them only for financial gain.

When Nollywood tries to highlight the problem of domestic violence in Nigeria and the challenges faced by abused women, the result usually falls short of the stated aim. 

For example, in A Private Storm, the filmmaker draws more sympathy for the abusive husband than for his battered wife. 

One has to ask why did the filmmakers choose to tell the story from the male perspective?

These plus many other short comings makes Nollywood products very soft in the criteria of making it to most festivals.