Sonia Sarkar reports on the vibrant Nigerian film industry and its India connect........
When Shashi Kapoor died last year, Nigerian film websites paid moving
tributes to him. And why not? Generations of Nigerians had grown up
watching his films. In the news website, Daily Trust, the
obituary by Gambo Dori read: "Whenever I watch films produced from
Kano-Kaduna axis I clearly see the enactment of the motions of Shashi
Kapoor and the like. Many productions particularly the soyayya (love
story) films are heavily indebted to the golden era of the Indian
cinema."
The West African republic,
the continent's most populous and
prosperous nation, may have a thriving 1,500-films-a-year industry -
worth $3.3 billion - today, but it wasn't like this always.
In the early 1920s and 30s, Syrian and Lebanese entrepreneurs
built chains of open-air cinema houses across Nigerian cities. People
made a beeline to watch Chinese and Hollywood movies even though they
were far removed from African society and culture. And then, in the
1960s, Indian cinema entered the Nigerian market.
Lebanese businessmen decided to import Bollywood films. They
were cheaper than American ones and made better business sense. Indian
hits such as Mother India, Bombay to Goa, The Burning Train, Deewar became wildly popular with Nigerian cine-goers.
"How much we recounted Amitabh Bachchan hanging from trains
and fighting the bad guy as a policeman," says Nigerian director and
screenwriter Femi Odugbemi.
Nigerians of that generation even coined nicknames for their
favourite Bollywood stars in the local Hausa language. Dharmendra was " sarkin karfi" or king of strength, Rishi Kapoor, "mace", meaning woman, and the name for Sanjay Dutt was " dan daba mai lasin" or hooligan with a licence. This trend continued right through the 1980s.
Over time, Nigerians also came to be exposed to indigenous films such as Ossie Davis's Kongi's Harvest (1970), Ola Balogun's A Deusa Negra (1978) and Orun Mooru (1982), but the oil doom and flailing economy across Africa meant local filmmakers couldn't afford to keep up their efforts.
The Nigerian film industry in its present form was born in the
1990s. In 1992, a Lagos-based VHS tape and electronic gadgets'
merchant, Kenneth Nnebue, sponsored the shooting of a video film titled Living in Bondage. Shot on a budget of $12,000, it defined the path for the new industry that came to be known as Nollywood.
The video boom, apart from powering a sleeping industry, was
also crucial socially. It kept Nigerian youth away from drugs and
alcohol.
"The Nigerian film industry is formed around the digital
cinema technology. It started out as a straight-to-video process but has
now settled into mostly working with advanced digital imaging
technologies. Most films are shot with professional digital cinema
cameras and very few are on celluloid," says Odugbemi.
Celebrated Nigerian actor Stephanie Okereke Linus, who has starred in films such as Dry, Boonville Redemption and Through The Glass, tells The Telegraph
in an email that during her growing up years, cinema meant nothing but
Bollywood. She says, "I have vivid memories of dancing to the songs.
Bollywood was one of the biggest influences that spurred my interest in
acting."
Incidentally, when Akon sang Chammak Challo to SRK's
Ra.One in 2011, it was said that singing a Hindi song came easy to the
American singer as he had spent his childhood years in Senegal - another
west African country - where Bollywood was venerated.
Films in Nollywood are made in English, Yoruba, Hausa and
Igbo, among other Nigerian languages, often borrow plots, styles and
music from Bollywood cinema and rework them in local settings. Among
them, Hausa-language films from northern Nigeria (the Kano-Kaduna area
referred to by Gambo Dori) made in Kannywood - the sub-film industry
within Nollywood - are most influenced by Bollywood music. Elements of
Bollywood in terms of storytelling and plot were also seen in
Yoruba-language movies such as Ola Balogun's Ajani Ogun (1976) and Adeyemi Afolayan's Kadara (1980).
Says Femi Odugbemi whose Gidi Blues (2016), travelled
to many international festivals, "The strength and narrative style of
Indian cinema inspires many films in Nigeria, especially in the northern
cities." He adds, "The biggest inspiration for Nollywood has been the
strength of cultural assertion in Bollywood films."
In "Bollywood comes to Nigeria", Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University Brian Larkin, writes, "After Maine Pyar Kiya
was released, one friend told me it was his favourite movie: 'I liked
the film' he said, 'because it taught me about the world'... The style
of the movies and plots deal with the problem of how to modernise while
preserving traditional values - not usually a narrative theme in a
Jean-Claude Van Damme or Steven Spielberg movie."
What Nigerian actor-director-producer Kunle Afolayan says,
builds on Larkin's friend's sentiment. Says Afolayan, "The USP of
Nollywood is to create Cinema Verite [truthful cinema]. Films that are
true to who we are and reflect our culture around the world."
The new films out of Nollywood are slices of African life and culture. For example, Tunde Kelani's Thunderbolt
focuses on the disunity among Africans, sexual politics in Nigerian
society and conflict between modernity and African traditions. Daniel
Oriahi's Taxi Driver: Oko Ashewo is a dark comedy thriller about Lagos
at night. The industry has experimented with themes such as occult,
prostitution and child abuse. Social issues such as the kidnapping of
Chibok girls by Boko Haram militants and Ebola also featured in films
such as The Missing Girls (2015) and 93 Days (2016), respectively. And Chukwuma Osakwe's J.U.D.E. hinted at the racial discrimination Africans face in India.
Osakwe, who learnt acting at the Mohali-based Mad Arts, the
late Jaspal Bhatti's film school, says, "In the film, a young Nigerian
advertising professional is shown travelling from Lagos to Chandigarh to
chase his dream of filmmaking. He faces hurdles but doesn't give up."
Nollywood is now the world's second largest film industry in
terms of number of films produced every year after Bollywood, and the
third largest in terms of revenues, after Hollywood and Bollywood. If it
had at some point drawn inspiration from Bollywood, it is now looking
to collaborate with it.
Director Odugbemi talks about the professionalism of Bollywood
and the strength of its infrastructure and value-chain globally as the
ambitions of Nollywood in the foreseeable future.
US-based journalist Emily Witt is more prescriptive. In an email to The Telegraph,
she says, "Nigeria could also benefit from learning how Bollywood has
maintained a thriving cinema-going culture while possibly facing some of
the same infrastructural challenges, and how to bring cinema not only
to middle class audiences but to lower-income populations as well."
An average Nollywood film with a budget of around $50,000 is
shot in three to four weeks. There has been a universal complaint about
the quality and standards of these films but some have made their mark
internationally. Films such as The Wedding Party (2016), Taxi Driver: Oko Ashewo (2015), 30 Days in Atlanta
(2014) and Thunderbolt (2000) were showcased in various film festivals
including the Toronto International Film festival. Afolayan's October 1
and Robert Peter's 30 Days in Atlanta have found international audience
on Netflix too. African digital content start-ups are also giving a
financial boost to the industry.
According to Nigerian filmmakers, after oil and agriculture,
Nollywood is one of the thriving industries, creating over a million
jobs every year.
In 2015, India's acting high commissioner to Nigeria, Kaisar
Alam, said the commission would facilitate collaboration between
Nollywood and Bollywood. Lagos-based film regulatory consultant Obiora
Chukwumba says, "Alam's vision of collaboration reflects some of the
desires in Nollywood. Authorities within Nollywood have severally
reached out to platforms within Bollywood for sharing knowledge."
Once again in 2015, when the former managing director of the
Nigerian Film Corporation, Danjuma Wurim Dadu, visited the 46th
International Film Festival of India in Goa, he urged Indian filmmakers
to shoot in Nigeria and co-produce films with Nollywood. Not long ago,
the Nigerian government provided a grant to the film industry to send
about 300 actors and producers to Bollywood for technical training.
Last year, Indian film financers participated at the Creative
Industries Summit in Lagos to examine the Nigerian film market. And more
recently, Linus participated in the Global Entrepreneurship Summit at
Hyderabad, where she discussed a few joint projects with a leading
Indian media magnate.
Anthropology professor Larkin points out that the Nigerian
audience is not happy with the contemporary "westernised content" of
Hindi films. The general sentiment that pervades is that it is against
the Indian traditional societal values they were exposed to in the Hindi
films of the past. But none of this has come in the way of the evolving
partnership. Nollywood sure knows how to leverage Bollywood's
strengths.
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