Paris gets a taste of Nigeria’s film industry on Wednesday with the start of the NollywoodWeek festival, with movies exploring love, family and duty, shorts and documentaries.<\/p>\n
Now in its 13th edition, the NOW festival this week showcases films not only from Nigeria’s Nollywood but also Ghanaian, Kenyan and Senegalese productions and filmmakers from the African diaspora.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
“We just thought it was an opportunity to change the narrative around African film.”<\/p>\n
Last year, for the first time a Nollywood movie “My Father’s Shadow” scored an official slot at Cannes, marking another step for an industry long seen as producing a stream of low-budget dramas.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
– A ‘lab for what’s coming’ –<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“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 DC Comics universe.<\/p>\n
Though streaming has given African film a wider audience and greater revenues, Nollywood is still growing more professional and structured, Noukoue said.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
“We are in a place where there are a lot of things that are needed for Nollywood to actually reach its potential.”<\/p>\n
NollywoodWeek is a “lab for what’s coming” and to showcase the creativity out of the continent.<\/p>\n
Panels this week will look at music rights and AI in film.<\/p>\n
“We want to break those boundaries and break those walls,” Noukoue said. “But it’s a lot of work to get to that.”<\/p>\n
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