Recently watched a documentary on the Nigerian film industry called Welcome To Nollywood, and those dudes crank out feature length regular people flicks as often as porn people in America crank out porns. Like seriously, they are in the streets of Lagos making 19 different movies right now, on the fly, and as fast as possible, yet with an attention to artistic flair that separates it somehow at the city market where stacks upon stacks of DVD burns sit in multi-colored plastic cases every week. I've had a fascination with Nollywood flicks for a while now, and actually coming back from Richmond one time, the Kenyan dude who runs the Columbia Country Market in downtrodden Columbia, Virginia, was watching African flicks in the store. He told me you had to go all the way to DC to get Nollywood stuff, which I've meant to do at some point, but never have, partially because I've been broke and partially because living inside my simple ass brain makes me wary of large urban clusters a whole lot more now that I'm older.
But Nollywood, which is the third largest film industry on Earth, behind L.A. and Bollywood, is completely independent, not funded by American money, not even really helped by the Nigerian government, although the films are a huge source of pride for Nigeria. It's a completely grass roots and independent industry that has blown up, and any figures it claims it pulls in has to be considered faulty at best considering a majority of its business is done hand to hand and in cash only marketplaces.
From what I understand, the flicks combine a larger worldliness with native (usually from rural areas) aspects. There's lots of supernatural shit going on, being religion is a mixed up mess over there (and actually in the news this week with Christians and Muslims killing each other) with the major religions mixing with indigenous beliefs into voodoo-riffic material for on-the-fly moviemakers. It seems to me that, by now, somebody would have set up a system where they have someone on the streets in Lagos who buys the new flicks up every week, sends them to America, where the legal ownership of already sketchily owned in Africa movies, would probably fly under the radar, and release twin bills of the more crazy or decent of these movies. It seems so obvious, and maybe if I rode up to D.C. to hit the internationally flavored part of town, this is happening already. But it needs to happen more, before Quentin Tarantino puts Joe Iko in a movie and acts like he blew up the whole Nollywood genre for America.
It's also amusing to me that it's a big thing here, what with filmmakers being very serious about their very serious business of making movies, to have guerrilla film contests where people make an entire movie, from idea to final cut, in a few days. That's pretty much how Nollywood works regularly. One of the Nigerian producers in the Welcome To Nollywood documentary was straight up saying if they wanted to get more out of their money in American movies, they should hire some Nigerians. That's an industry that could use some international outsourcing anyways.
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