Nollywood: Something Out of Nothing

From traditional voodoo stories, via realistic tales with urban themes, to ground-breaking genre films: Nigerian cinema has a wide range indeed. Join the ride as Nigerian filmmaker Abba Makama sets out to explain the Lagos-based film industry we know as Nollywood – an industry that produces up to 50 films per week, often with a budget of less than 10 000 dollars.

The term Nollywood was coined for the first time in a New York Times-article in the early 2000s. But the Nigerian film industry began to bloom several decades earlier, drawing inspiration from 1970s travelling films. It then collapsed, but gained new momentum in the early 1990s thanks to the introduction of home videos. Living on Bondage, the six-hour epic from 1992, created for television, is considered to be the industry's major breakthrough.

Makama’s documentary has directors, actors and film critics explain the importance of Nollywood partly as a reaction to Western portrayals of Africans on film, a point which furthers our understanding of why these films have become so important in Nigeria and beyond. Let yourself be seduced by a film nation who has made great entertainment out of almost nothing. Johanne Svendsen Rognlien

Abba Makama is a Nigerian filmmaker, actor and artist. He studied film at New York University and runs his own production company, Osiris. Makama was commissioned by the TV-channel Al Jazeera to make Nollywood. His feature film debut Green White Green (2016) screened at the Toronto International Film Festival.