Paris has a taste of Nigeria’s film industry with the start of the Nollywood Week festival, with movies exploring love, family and duty, shorts and documentaries.
Now in its 13th edition, the NOW festival — which opened on Wednesday, May 6th — showcases films not only from Nigeria’s Nollywood but also Ghanaian, Kenyan and Senegalese productions and filmmakers from the African diaspora.
“With my partners, we came to the realisation that a city like Paris just could not ignore the cultural phenomenon that Nollywood had become,” co-founder Serge Noukoue told AFP about the festival, which began in 2013.
“We just thought it was an opportunity to change the narrative around African film.”
Last year, a Nollywood movie My Father’s Shadow scored an official slot at Cannes for the first time, marking another step for an industry long seen as producing a stream of low-budget dramas.
The rise of streaming services and the growing popularity of African music such as Afrobeats and Amapiano has helped expose film culture to new audiences — as well as increasing quality, access and funding.
But producers still struggle to reach outside Africa beyond the diaspora despite making many more films every year than Hollywood. India’s Bollywood is the largest in terms of numbers produced.
The five-day NOW festival, based in the Paris classic arthouse L’Arlequin, showcases films such as East West Love, a love story between Nigeria and Kenya, and Evi Superstar, about a rising Nigerian singer forced to rebuild her career.
Mothers of Chibok looks at the impact of the kidnapping of the Chibok girls by jihadists in Nigeria in 2014, while Batwing Unmasked: An African Superhero examines the first African superhero in the DC Comics universe.
Though streaming has given African film a wider audience and greater revenues, Nollywood is still growing more professional and structured, Noukoue said.
“I think we’re looking at an industry that is ambitious, but that doesn’t necessarily have the means to sustain that ambition at the moment,” he said.
“We are in a place where there are a lot of things that are needed for Nollywood to actually reach its potential.”
Panels this week will look at music rights and AI in film.
“We want to break those boundaries and break those walls,” Noukoue said. “But it’s a lot of work to get to that.”
