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This is Nollywood

Tuhin — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 05:01:08 +0000

Nollywood, Nigeria’s booming film industry, is the world’s third largest producer of feature films. Unlike Hollywood and Bollywood, however, Nollywood movies are made on shoe-string budgets of time and money. An average production takes just 10 days and costs approximately $15,000.

Yet in just 13 years, Nollywood has grown from nothing into a $250 million dollar-a-year industry that employs thousands of people. The Nollywood phenomenon was made possible by two main ingredients: Nigerian entrepreneurship and digital technology.

In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, Lagos and other African cities faced growing epidemics of crime and insecurity. Movie theaters closed as people became reluctant to be out on the streets after dark. Videos for home viewing imported from the West and India were only mildly popular. Nigerians saw an opportunity to fill the void with products of their own.

Experts credit the birth of Nollywood to a businessman who needed to unload thousands of blank tapes and to the 1992 video release of Living in Bondage, a movie with a tale of the occult that was an instant and huge-selling success. It wasn’t long before other would-be producers jumped on the bandwagon.

Currently, some 300 producers churn out movies at an astonishing rate—somewhere between 500 and 1,000 a year. Nigerian directors adopt new technologies as soon as they become affordable. Bulky videotape cameras gave way to their digital descendents, which are now being replaced by HD cameras. Editing, music, and other post-production work is done with common computer-based systems. The films go straight to DVD and VCD disks.

Thirty new titles are delivered to Nigerian shops and market stalls every week, where an average film sells 50,000 copies. A hit may sell several hundred thousand. Disks sell for two dollars each, making them affordable for most Nigerians and providing astounding returns for the producers.

Not much else about Nollywood would make Hollywood envious. Shooting is inevitably delayed by obstacles unimaginable in California. Lagos, home to 15 million people (expected to be 24 million by 2010), is a nightmare of snarled traffic, pollution, decaying infrastructure, and frequent power outages.

Star actors, often working on several films at once, frequently don’t show up when they’re supposed to. Location shooting is often delayed by local thugs, or “touts”, who extort money for protection before they will allow filming to take place in their territories.

Yet Nollywood producers are undeterred. They know they have struck a lucrative and long-neglected market – movies that offer audiences characters they can identify with in stories that relate to their everyday lives. Western action-adventures and Bollywood musicals provide little that is relevant to life in African slums and remote villages.

Nollywood stars are native Nigerians. Nollywood settings are familiar. Nollywood plots depict situations that people understand and confront daily; romance, comedy, the occult, crooked cops, prostitution, and HIV/AIDS.

“We are telling our own stories in our own way,” director Bond Emeruwa says. “That is the appeal both for the filmmakers and for the audience.”

The appeal stretches far beyond Nigeria. Nollywood films are proving popular all over English-speaking Africa and have become a staple on M-NET, the South African based satellite television network. Nigerian stars have become household names from Ghana to Zambia and beyond. The last few years have seen the growing popularity of Nollywood films among African diaspora in both Europe and America.

“Look out, Hollywood,” one exuberant Nigerian producer exclaims. “Here we come!”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_of_Nigeria

http://www.thisisnollywood.com/

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Interesting News – Hollywood meets Bollywood in Oscar-hyped `Slumdog’

Tuhin — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 16:28:48 +0000

Hollywood and Bollywood rarely meet. But in the new film “Slumdog Millionaire,” the two international epicenters of filmmaking find an unusually fruitful cinematic union.

The connection comes by way of British director Danny Boyle, who shot the film in Mumbai, India, with a cast of mostly Bollywood and local nonprofessional actors.

Filming with handheld digital cameras and working with a small crew from London, Boyle plunged into the slums of Mumbai to capture the city’s vibrancy not like a foreigner, but like a chameleon.

“The normal thing you do as a film director is you take a bit of life, you stop it, control it, and then recreate it endless times to shoot it,” said Boyle. “We did some stuff like that, obviously, but it feels a bit fake. It’s got that kind of atmosphere thing that you can’t quantify. Some of it’s sound, but some of it’s also visuals. If there’s not that randomness about it, you don’t believe it.”

The story of “Slumdog Millionaire” itself is a bit unbelievable. It’s about a teenager (Dev Patel) from the slums of Mumbai who ends up rising to the top of India’s version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.”

A doubtful policeman interrogates him, accusing him of cheating. But his reasons for knowing each answer reflects his life story _ a kind of truthful version of “The Usual Suspects.” To do this, the part played by Patel also needed to be cast for two younger children _ as did two supporting roles.

The casting headaches and the international production could have easily ended in disaster, or at least a poor movie. But “Slumdog Millionaire” has been hailed (Rolling Stone called it one of the year’s best) and is getting a full Academy Awards push from Fox Searchlight, which also distributed the Oscar underdog “Little Miss Sunshine.”

Hollywood blog Movie City News’ “Gurus o’ Gold,” which compiles the Oscar prognostications of 14 leading industry insiders and critics, has “Slumdog” as a favorite for a best picture nomination.

The 52-year-old Boyle is known for the variety of his work, from 1996’s druggie drama “Trainspotting” to 2002’s horror film “28 Days Later” and last year’s sci-fi space adventure “Sunshine.”

But the last time that he took cameras to an exotic foreign land _ for Leonardo DiCaprio’s “Titanic” follow-up, “The Beach” _ things didn’t work out as well. The movie was panned and Boyle doesn’t recall it fondly.

“If you go in as a bit of an invading army, it’s much more difficult to adjust appropriately because you’re just too big,” said Boyle. “I’ve done that before. I went to Thailand to make `The Beach’ and I went with a huge crew. Three months in Thailand, who’d say no to that? But in terms of making the film, I’m not sure that’s the way to do it these days.”

Producer Christian Colson said sending “hundreds of Europeans” into India didn’t make sense.

“It would have been very expensive, but it’s also dumb,” said Colson. “We’re traveling to one of the major filmmaking centers of the world _ why do that?”

This time, Boyle kept the crew smaller and was working with a modest $15 million budget. He also enlisted casting director Loveleen Tandan, who helped so much (with work in the second-filming unit and local knowledge) that Boyle gave her a co-director credit in some markets.

“Danny never came in with a set of expectations,” said Tandan. “He just went for it and was open. It’s not about Bollywood or Hollywood or London. It’s just him that made the film unique.”

About a quarter of the film’s dialogue is in Hindi _ generally an impediment to U.S. box office success. The decision to go with subtitles was not originally in the all-English script by Simon Beaufoy (“The Fully Monty”), who loosely adapted Vikas Swarup’s novel “Q & A.”

But finding young English-speaking Indian children who could still play poor, uneducated characters proved near impossible. So their dialogue was shifted to Hindi just four or five weeks before production.

“That was a massive liberation,” said Colson, who financed the film privately. “If we’d had to persuade a studio of that decision, we’d still be arguing about it now.”

Bollywood’s ways of making films can differ greatly from Hollywood’s. Films are made incrementally _ often just a few days at a time _ to fit the schedules of the very popular stars. Financing is also done piecemeal, with producers paying more only after seeing early results.

“The film is sort of made in an Indian way,” said Colson, adding that they did have a schedule and all the money in advance. “I think it’s in the soul of the film.

“Marrying that culture to what we’re used to, I think it would have been very difficult 20 or 30 years ago. It’s changing now.”

That marriage is most evident in a big, Bollywood-esque dance number that Boyle said just felt “natural” to include.

One way the cultures failed to mingle was in casting the lead. For the teenage Jamal, Boyle only found muscular and “butch” actors from Bollywood. He cast the scrawnier Patel from London.

“The hardest thing I found on this film was getting out of that foreign mind-set,” said Patel, whose only previous credit is the British teen drama “Skins.” “Getting into the mind of a slum kid was really hard.”

Boyle said the Oscar buzz for “Slumdog” has been “an amazing vehicle” to finding attention for an independent film that might not have otherwise gotten much attention. But months after his experience in Mumbai, he’s still buzzing about it.

“There will be more and more of that hybrid stuff going on that connects Bollywood and Hollywood. Without a doubt,” said Boyle. “It just looks natural that it’s going to happen.”

By JAKE COYLE

The Associated Press
Friday, November 7, 2008

Some excellent storytelling

Tuhin — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 07:40:26 +0000

This is not really a story idea from India, but a sharing of some excellent work being done by Brian Storm & his organization Mediastorm, in turning photo-journalists into audio-visual storytellers.

Haunting!

Some of you may have seen these already, but we would like to request the others to watch when they have the time.

And,by the way, there are lots of stories like these in India!

(Click on the pictures to view)

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Kingsley is a 23-year-old lifeguard from the West African coastal town of Limbe, Cameroon. Though he longed to be a professional footballer, French soldiers trained him to become a lifeguard, and Kingsley soon found himself working at an upscale hotel giving swimming lessons to visiting Europeans. He earned just 50 euros a month, enough to pay for food and the rented two-room house he shared with his parents and seven siblings.

“Most families in my country want their children to go to Europe,” Kingsley says. It is in Europe – the new El Dorado – that African immigrants can vastly increase their incomes while also providing for their families back home. So, in May of 2004, Kingsley left Cameroon on what he calls “his mission.” What followed was an excruciating six-month journey across half of Africa.

Kingsley’s Crossing is the story of one man’s willingness to abandon everything – his family, his country, and his friends – in the hopes of finding a better life abroad.
Award-winning French photojournalist Olivier Jobard documents the passage.

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In 2004, anywhere from 20 to 30 young addicts lived on the ninth floor of an elegant narrow building overlooking Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The squatters had turned the sprawling apartment into a dark, desperate and chaotic place.

People hustled, scored, shot and smoked wherever they could. Friends conned each other for their next hit. They slept on piles of clothes on the floor. The power was shut off; the bathroom unusable; the kitchen filled with garbage. Anything of value was sold off.

For nearly three years, Jessica Dimmock followed this crew documenting what happened to them after eviction, how they fought to get clean, sank deeper into addiction, went to jail, started families and struggled to survive.