Yoruba Nollywood, the sub-genre of the acclaimed Nigerian film industry, Nollywood, is currently under assaults from illiteracy, incompetence and ignorance.

If the main multi-million dollars Nollywood industry itself has attracted a lot of criticisms on accounts of its technical deficiencies, pedestrian storylines, unprofessional scripting and suboptimal filming methodology, amidst other imperfections, its Yoruba subset fares worse on many indices of performing arts critique.

Apart from the productions of a professional like Tunde Kelani, the bulk of the output from the Yoruba stable is, as far as I am concerned, works of unspeakable banality. The problem starts right from the titles of the films themselves, if you forgive the often puerile and unimaginative choice of titles, you would definitely still have a learned axe to grind with the titles on account of orthographical blunders.

In order not to attract the insinuation of malicious demarketing of any particular producer or artiste, I would not give any real example to drive home this point, but let anyone scan through some of the titles of these ubiquitous Yoruba films on the shelf and see how many of them have correct spelling in accordance with modern Yoruba orthography.

But that is just a tip of the iceberg. Let us now focus on the so-called rendition of the plays in English, otherwise called subtitling, which appears on the screensupposedly in real time to the diction flow of the performers. You would be exceedingly shocked by the renditions! If these people can’t speak or write good English, can’t they at least give their works to people with the abilities to help out? You would encounter, among other pratfalls, direct word translation from Yoruba to English in attempts to convey Yoruba ideas, which of course, often abysmally fails in communicating the underlying message.

What about the use of effects? Imagine a car merely screeching to a halt and the driver flung his head on the steering to convey the impression of a fatal accident! All these are aside from observable lack of depth in their production dramaturgy.

But by far the most annoying aspect is the inexorable pre-occupation of these filmmakers with superstition. Hardly would you watch any Yoruba film in contemporary times without seeing reality being distorted through fantastic treatment. The often peddled excuse that such projections are a reflection of our culture and belief system does not hold water.

The mere fact that our forefathers had a worldview commensurate with their times does not mean every film you churn out in the 21st century must reflect anachronistic magic and superstition.

I know a friend who actively discourages his children from watching these Yoruba films, all in an attempt to shield them from being contaminated with “illiteracies”. The embarrassing state of affair of the Yoruba film industry is particularly painful when it is noted that the precursors to what we now know as Nollywood started in Yorubaland in the 60s and continued even to the 80s with the indelible performances of legends like the late Hubert Ogunde, Ola Balogun, Kola Ogunmola, Duro Ladipo, Olaiya Adejumo (aka Baba Sala), the late Adeyemi Afolayan (Ade love) and Akin Ogungbe.

These people were hard-core professionals, who were profoundly passionate about their works, in spite of severe limitation of their times. It is true that the works of these great ones too featured supernaturalism, but it was because this was inherently bound with the themes of their films. For example, films like Aiye, Jaiyesinmi, Oba Koso, Oba Moro etc, were thematically fantastic and could not have been done in any other way.

This is unlike what we have today where almost every film, even the one that has ultramodern setting, would nonetheless brim with fantastic episodes, as if reality can never exist without the touch of magic! Our main Nollywood industry (English) is, to a lesser extent, also guilty of this proclivity for surrealism.

The Yoruba are among the most educated and culturally advanced of any African ethnic groups therefore, why are most contemporary films of Yoruba expression so miserably sub-standard? The answer is this: the segment of the Yoruba population that engages in film productions (unlike the main Nollywood) is at best semi-literates. Granted that there is a sprinkle of educated ones among the actors and actresses, the fact still remains that 90 percent of them are artisans and school dropouts, who took to acting, first as hobbies, before making it fulltime profession.

Unfortunately, they retained their amateurish mentality. There is a real need for the real professionals to take over the Yoruba film making industry, lest the whole world might be misled, via exposure to “African Magic Yoruba” on DSTV, to think the current amateurish outputs are the best that can come from Oodua land.

BY:KAYODE KETEFE

It's just that everything Nigerian has been hijacked by touts. Nollywood itself is not any different.
I have no problem with super-naturalism if it can be aptly told as they did in Thunderbolt-Magun.

To be honest,it's about time.

YorubaMovies mimics Nollywoods banal plots. Same shoit over and over and over.....

They need to stop demonizing esu, witches, and our native religion. Why can't we have nice witches ehn?

@stillwater....Oh my God, I love that Thunderbolt movie!

God bless the Op for pointing out some of the numerous flaws of the Yoruba movie industry. I hope they improve or else, their continual treading of this path of low standard eventually amounts to irrelevance.

Pls, I want to see this Yoruba movie- 'Aramotu'. Heard it is a total departure from the ususal garbage. Anyone in the house who has seen it?

Apart from the juju thing, hearing or reading the title discourages me from seeing the movie. Most of their movies presently are filled with unrealistic scenes, people cursing eachother heavily just for fun and they lacked proper costume. I noticed that just to create bloodstains on a victim of gunshot na WAEC for them. What about the recent craze in making dry comical movies. If 30 movies were produced in a day, hardly ll you see 8-10 of them talking about other aspects of life. The rest ll be comedy, comedy, comedy. And the movies are so short that the producer ll deliberately make it part 1 & 2 and much of it's duration must have been filled with adverts.
Except the professionals take up Yoruba Nolly, more garbages ll be produced for years to come.