Even though Nigeria didn’t get much love at this year’s FESPACO film festival, some Parisian organizers believe that the francophone world has been ready for Naija cinema. Nollywood, the world’s second largest film industry, produces over 2000 films annually, and now, seven of its best will be screened at France’s first ever NollywoodWeek Paris (and […]
Zina Saro-Wiwa’s “alt-Nollywood” short film, Phyllis, is one of the weirder fifteen minutes of film I’ve seen in some time. “Using Nollywood to subvert Nollywood,” it is an atmospheric, impressionistic, and haunting film, chronicling Phyllis’s emotional states as she takes the wigs that form such a huge part of her identity on and off.
Somewhere in the opening shot of The Assassin’s Practice there is a woman crying alone in bed, tangled in a blue room. If the sound of her racking sobs is enough to turn your stomach, you won’t be able to handle all of the sudden hysterical plot twists or the unpredictable side stories that fuel […]
This past summer on a rainy June afternoon, I spent a few hours interviewing Nigerian poet and critic, Odia Ofeimun. I met him while co-producing a radio documentary about Nollywood (streaming in full here). Odia has been writing about life in Lagos for the last forty years. His observations reflect many of the key tensions […]
Axe of Vengeance: Ghanaian Film Posters and Film Viewing Culture opened last week in Bloomington, Indiana. This exhibit features hand-painted Ghanaian film posters made by Ghanaian artists in the late 1980s to mid-1990s advertising Hollywood, Kung Fu, Bollywood, Nollywood, and Ghanaian films. This was commercial art for urban film houses and theaters that consisted of a […]
The London Olympics starts tonight and certain streets of the city are swollen with purple-shirted volunteers, track-suited athletes and tourists. In Hyde Park, the continent of Africa has been reincarnated as ‘Africa Village’ and ‘Africa Land’; the emphasis is on colour and diversity, mass acceptance of bland positivisms, but the whole event feels mainly about corporate […]
My latest list of new African films or films with African topics. From now on I’ll start numbering them. So this is N°1. This list include “The Ambassador,” a Western set in Namibia, a sort of sequal to “eLollipop” and a documentary about Kenya’s version of “America’s Best Dance Crew.”
In a recent article in The Guardian, Phil Hoad writes that ‘maverick’ Nigerian director Jeta Amata is perhaps ‘Nollywood’s gift to Hollywood’, for Amata’s recent feature is a Hollywood-friendly big budget epic, delving into the horrific situation in the Niger Delta and the havoc that the oil industry leaves behind. Hoad’s article is a nice […]
If you’re wondering what took us so long to say something about South African rapper Spoek Mathambo’s new music video — for his cover of Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control” [corrected], well, we can’t make up our mind about it. The video, above, got a lot of attention when it first came out in late […]
Nollywood film posters in a store window on Nostrand Ave. in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Photo: Boima.
