₦airaland Forum

Afam4eva: I thought Jim Iyke denied dating her...If there's one thing i've noticed, it is that these celebrities will always look for an opportunity to remain relevant. This looks like one of those opportunities.

Jim Iyke: Nadia, how are you?

nadia: I'm fine ooo. I've not seen you in any movies recently. What happened.

Jim Iyke: My sister, that's why i called you. I also noticed that you're in the same predicament.

Nadia: So, what do you want us to do

Jim Iyke: let's do something that will make people talk so that Directors will remember us.

lol

wow, Damilola is trying to make a name for herself, I think she is a beautiful & good actress however I wouldn't say this semi-unclad move was a good choice, but I can't wait to see her new movie though.
http://lindaikeji..com/2013/05/actress-damilola-adegbite-poses-half.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+%2FkSCld+%28Welcome+to+Linda+Ikeji%27s+Blog%29

[quote author=tpia@]in most instances, oral history is more reliable but only if you know how to interpret it.

not everywhere has egyptians pyramids and roman mausoleums which are easily visible and traceable.[/quote]True, but it is difficult, for example for the most part that is how native americans and native Indians in south america transferred their history but I feel in today's age in order to avoid any doubt from people who want facts or people discrediting the history all together. It is best to make it confirmed and Legit, so nobody will oppose it as the truth. For example Thomas Jefferson the third president of the United states had four mixed race kids with his slave mistress, it was only his black descendants that passed this story orally down the generations. His white descendants didn't know until it was brought to the light from the media, his white descendants rejected it until a DNA test proved the black descendants were proven to be related to Thomas Jefferson. It shut the mouths of the racists, white descendants of Thomas Jefferson, white historians that refused to believe this story of Thomas Jefferson secret life while owning slaves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fhc1xr3CEM4

Antivirus92: long time my south--western friend. where have u been?

Just busy with life in general, you thread looks interesting, this is what the culture section should be talking about more

Antivirus92: i agree with you 100%. Archeological evidence is more accurate than most oral tradition. Two tribes may have different account of history where as similar archeological findings were found in their respective lands.

True, I agree

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9LkpJdll9A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6wKaIEzxGo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5f0JxwR-0k

It's not like they are slaves, so they have the right to leave the job if they want to but in general I don't think they have any rights in general when it comes to their job.

pleep: Because they are not Nigerians they are actually awera rebublicans and should be in a serparate country. (the fulani should be driven into the sea)

... i like hausa people tho, especially their language

lol, funny though because some people say that hausa and fulani act differently from the rest of Nigeria when it comes to swagger, mentality and etc, that in a way when people do meet them face to face it's hard for them to believe they are Nigerians in general

I am not surprised with number 1 to 5 in the least tolerant

Baayanjida: I am Hausa from republic of Niger ,living in United states for over 8 years. I've met lot of Nigerians,and none of them believed me when I said I am Hausa.
They said my accent doesn't sound west African.

In my apartment complex ( Indianapolis-Indiana ) ,there are some Yoruba next door,and they never knew that my wife and I are Hausa til they heard us speaking Hausa . One guy was like
" are you hausa ?",and I said yes ,we are Hausa from Zinder- Niger .
They confused us with Sudanese or Somalis,because of the way my wife dressed and our accent....lol .
There are lot of Hausa in United states,you have to go to mosque to met them,and if you ever doubted seeing one,you might confuse him/her to sudanese,unless you ask his/her nationality.

maybe because many Hausa's don't travel out to the US like other tribes in Nigeria do

shymexx: Jokers!!

Big ups to Assata Shakur, strong black woman!!

she better stay in Cuba

PAPA AFRICA: and as far as i know this only happens in the Americas, Africans don't claim mixed raced people. i read an interview of a old Nigerian artist and james brown had come to visit and they asked him why his wife was white but she was actually mixed and James began to cry claiming that she aint white. she wasn't but to the Nigerians all half castes were white.

c/s 100%

you are right, the one drop rule doesn't exist in Nigeria or in Africa in general. If somebody is mixed, in west africa, particularly Nigeria they are labeled half-caste, mixed race, or white. For example former president of Ghana Jerry Rawlings who contributed to Ghana's progression has been called half-caste or mixed race racially despite the fact that he is Ghanian by nationality(and culturally to a extent) and respected by most Ghanians politically. Or Sade, many Nigerians are fans of her music, and despite the fact she was born in Nigeria(but raised in England), she is consider mixed race by Nigerians.

I don't know why somali5 put this topic in this forum

lalaosky: Source:http://m.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=499085176774632&id=293103214039497&set=a.293116934038125.92708.293103214039497&refid=28&_ft_=qid.5764845006716897760%3Amf_story_key.-1998835782921708681

Good for her but I am a little surprised

Kudo's to angelina, a beautiful and good actress. She chose her health for her sake and for the sake of her children(so they won't go through what she went through when she lost her mother).

He was just a poor kid from London, but Jason Njoku has master­minded the African equivalent of Netflix.
[b]"Four years ago, Jason Njoku sat down with his old friend Bastian Gotter and told him about an investment opportunity in Nigeria, a precious resource that was sitting there, just waiting to be exploited: movies. Despite their crude quality and cruder distribution system, Nigerian films are wildly popular in Africa, yet they are dirt cheap to acquire and distribute. Njoku proposed buying the rights and streaming the films online. He only needed some money to get started. "I was thinking, This sounds like one of those emails," Gotter says--the kind from a princeling who promises you easy riches as soon as you give him your bank account number.

Most investors wouldn't dare venture onto the continent, for all the obvious reasons: instability, corruption, rampant piracy, substandard infrastructure. Njoku, in fact, was nearly as nervous as his friend. "It was like, Danger, danger, this is pretty crazy," he recalls. But he and Gotter ignored the perils and created Iroko Partners, one of the first successes of Nigeria's embryonic tech scene--a startup that aspires to be Africa's Netflix, but without red envelopes, or real competitors.

By the time I first met him in 2011, at his cramped and sweaty Lagos headquarters, Njoku (pronounced in-JOKE-oo), a burly, boastful 32-year-old, had become the talk of Nollywood, Nigeria's movie industry. His office, decorated with giant photos of Nollywood stars, was crowded with young employees at flat-screen computers, busily assembling a database of the site's offerings, titles such as Campus Girls and Lord of the Game. As we talked, an assistant interrupted frequently and handed Njoku stacks of videos, and he would scribble out a check or produce a wad of Nigerian bank notes: content acquisition, African style. He was buying up entire catalogs from local movie producers. "Under a very thin veil of creativity, it's about 'I need to get my money,'" Njoku said. "We will shout, we will scream, we will have arguments. But there are deals to be done."

Indeed there are, and Njoku isn't the only one trying to make them. The poorest continent lags the rest of the world by every measure of development, but to a brave and growing band of tech entrepreneurs, it represents a last frontier. Internet access is expanding rapidly in Africa, especially in Nigeria, which, along with the country's oil-fueled economic growth, has made it a destination for investment. The technology sector is also drawing strength from a recession-driven influx of young returnees with Nigerian roots like Njoku, who was born in Britain. As local technology entrepreneur Ayo Alli says, "Things are moving very fast in Lagos."
Given the difficulty of obtaining reliable financial information of any kind in Africa, it's hard to know exactly how much money Nollywood generates. In 2011, the World Bank came up with an estimate of $500 million in annual legal revenue--a tiny sum compared to the $16 billion that the bank said Hollywood contributes to the California economy in a year, but enough to make the movie industry Nigeria's fourth-largest economic sector. Yet the report also estimated that distribution failures and piracy were costing Nollywood hundreds of millions a year in revenues, consigning the country's moviemakers to a vicious circle of low budgets and artistic frustration.

Njoku says he knows how to fix this problem. Raised by a single mother in a council flat in southeast London (he never knew his father), Njoku dresses like a techie and talks like a character in a Guy Ritchie film. He left London to study chemistry at the University of Manchester, where he shared a flat with Gotter, a classmate from Germany. "I've never met someone with such infinite belief in himself," Gotter says. Gotter went on to help Njoku with a few of his early enterprises, including a party-promotion venture in nightclubs and a magazine called Brash, which touted itself as "Manchester's quintessential guide to frolicking and fashion." After the magazine died, Njoku started a network of blogs intended to appeal to upwardly mobile professionals; it had the misfortune to launch the week that Lehman Brothers collapsed. Njoku was forced to move back into his mother's apartment. "It was largely acknowledged," he says now, "that I was an absolute, complete failure."

But defeat led to a revelation. Njoku says he noticed a change in his mother's television viewing habits. When he was growing up, she mostly watched British soaps; now she was avidly consuming entertainment from her home country--Nollywood movies. During the 2000s, the Nigerian industry had exploded, becoming the largest in the world measured by number of releases. The films, which are produced almost exclusively for the video market, feature histrionic acting and overwrought plots involving infidelity, murder, and witchcraft. "My first impulse was 'These production values are just terrible,'" Njoku says.
When he looked past the melodrama and the poor quality, Njoku recognized a business opportunity. The Nigerian video distribution system is incredibly inefficient. It starts at a rambunctious outdoor market on the fringes of Lagos called Alaba, where so-called marketers--wholesaler dealers who sometimes double as movie financiers--sell discs in bulk to a network of regional traders. They, in turn, pass the discs through the supply chain until they end up with street-corner hawkers, who retail them for the equivalent of a dollar or two. The discs his mother watched arrive at London's African groceries in overstuffed suitcases or via a rudimentary overseas rights market controlled by small-time DVD merchants.
Outside of Africa, though, Nollywood releases were often hard to find, so movie fans in the overseas diaspora had taken to sharing movies on YouTube, chopping them into 10-minute increments to get around time limits the service then imposed. The uploads violated copyright, but no one in Nollywood was complaining, because YouTube didn't reach their African consumers. Poking around, Njoku could see that the unauthorized streams were getting tens of thousands of views. He wondered: What if he served this audience, but legally, and sold ads against the content? That's when he persuaded Gotter to give him a few hundred pounds, and he flew to Lagos to search for movie producers.

Despite his parentage, Njoku had visited Nigeria only a few times. As a newcomer, he was stunned when he wandered into Alaba market. It was an entertainment bazaar, its stalls piled high with both Nigerian movies and pirated American films and TV shows. Early on, he learned that Nollywood is a close-knit business--"lots of brothers and cousins and people who come from the same village," Njoku says. As word spread that he was paying cash for content, marketers started showing up at his office, carrying shoeboxes and plastic bags filled with Nollywood classics. He presented himself as a friend, not a competitor, because his audience was abroad. Even more important, he could offer them another revenue stream in a world of rampant piracy, where new releases are knocked off almost immediately, rendering them almost worthless within weeks or even days. It's often hard to tell the genuine discs from the bootlegs, and they are priced comparably, because legal content must sell cheap if it wants to compete. As a consequence, the idea of a long-tail business had never occurred to anyone at Alaba. Njoku was able to acquire 200 titles, paying marketers between $100 and $1,000 a title for licenses of varying duration. He launched a website called Nollywood Love and struck a content partnership with YouTube, which hosted his streams and inserted commercials into them, giving Njoku a murkily defined cut of the ad revenue.
To get bigger, Njoku needed real money. He got a break in 2011, when technology writer Sarah Lacy visited Njoku and produced a hair-raising account of his interactions with the volatile Alaba crowd for the blog TechCrunch. Shortly afterward, Njoku heard from Nazar Yasin, an executive at multibillion-dollar hedge-fund firm Tiger Global Management. Tiger Global invested primarily in technology--it was an early backer of Facebook--and it was looking for opportunities in Africa. The hedge fund's team visited Njoku's Lagos headquarters and liked what they saw. The result was an $8 million financing round, which also included the Swedish investment firm Kinnevik. Njoku used around $5 million of the money to amass the rights to some 5,000 films--what the company claims is "the largest legally assembled library on planet Earth" of Nollywood content.

Not everyone in Lagos sees Iroko's strategy as benevolent. "They bleed us white!" shouts Paul Obazele, a veteran actor and producer, when I ask him about Njoku's website. Like many on the creative side of Nollywood, he equates all video streaming with piracy. And while Obazele speaks in Nollywood-style hyperbole, he points out a real conflict. Nigerian law is ambiguous about who retains ownership of a movie's copyright--the producers who created the film or the marketers who financed it--though as a practical matter the financiers usually end up holding the master copy and thus control of the film. Most Nigerian movie deals are oral agreements anyway; an academic described the industry to me as "Hollywood without contracts." As a result, producers and financiers can, and often do, make competing claims on the same intellectual property, with little chance for legal redress.

Many Nollywood tycoons started out by selling black-market copies of Hollywood releases; shooting their own movies was simply an inexpensive way to acquire fresh content. Legitimate marketers also produce a continual flood of new titles in an attempt to outmaneuver pirates. But though original fare now represents the lion's share of Alaba's business, the legal and illegal markets still coexist.

Within Nigeria, disputes about rights are usually handled informally, through cash payments or muscle, but in the developed world, legitimacy, ironically enough, brings legal hassles. So before it acquires a movie, Iroko requires the seller to produce proof that he owns the copyright, and it videotapes the transaction, just in case things end up in court. "We try as much as possible to document as much as possible," says Tope Lucas, Iroko's Lagos-based attorney. She recalls one impostor who went so far as to splice his name into a movie's opening credits as executive producer. The company busted him, and Lucas contends that Iroko has dealt with only a handful of infringement claims.

Nollywood insiders are skeptical that Njoku can catch every fraudulent assertion of ownership, given the industry's careless standards and the country's endemic corruption. "They take the cash, and they sign something," says one entertainment industry investor. "But where's the chain of title?" Njoku says his rights are unassailable, and he has been aggressive in defending them. He began by trying to remove unauthorized clips from YouTube and other sites, filing notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). When a competitor started a copycat website called irokotvmovies.com, Njoku filed a complaint with the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization, which shut down the site for trademark infringement. And last year, he brought a suit in U.S. federal court alleging that a Nigerian living in Georgia was illegally streaming movies owned by Iroko. (The competitor claims he had obtained rights to the content.) Njoku says that his targets have retaliated with dirty tricks, such as filing spurious DMCA notices, causing problems with his web hosts and occasionally disabling Iroko's ads.

At the same time, Njoku was struggling with YouTube, his distribution partner. Although his site generated 150 million views in 2011 and $1.3 million in advertising, Njoku felt that YouTube executives treated him with indifference, and he was annoyed by the heightened scrutiny of any transaction involving a Nigerian IP address. So last year, he decided to build his own platform. The move was daring. Going it alone meant Iroko would have to give up YouTube's built-in audience and replace infrastructure that Google had provided for free. The company refuses to disclose its page views or revenue as a stand-alone site, but Gotter does say that storing movies in the cloud brought new back-end costs of more than $1 million a year.

Still, the gamble could pay off if Njoku can expand his reach in Africa. Around 90% of Iroko's traffic today comes from the estimated 30 million African emigrants spread throughout the world. Njoku aims to reverse that proportion. The obstacle, as usual, is infrastructure. Only a tiny fraction of consumers in Africa have broadband connections, or their own computers, for that matter; many rely on Internet cafes. And the pipes to carry the video streams back to Africa from overseas, where Iroko has its servers, aren't yet robust enough for heavy traffic.

Yet the history of the Internet in the developed world suggests the rewards go to companies that position themselves when the technology is still impractical. And Njoku feels the trends are in his favor. A study by McKinsey & Co. estimates that the number of Internet users in sub-Saharan Africa has more than doubled since 2008, to 118 million. Telecom companies are also investing billions to bring undersea fiber-optic cables ashore, with capacity expected to triple or quadruple soon, so streaming videos stored abroad should become more feasible.

Along with the move toward self-reliance, Iroko has shifted from a free-content business model to a subscription-based hybrid. "The industry cannot be built on free. People need to pay," Njoku tells me, sounding every bit the content entrepreneur, as we have lunch on the Lower East Side in New York. His new site still has thousands of free titles but offers a Netflix-style premium option for $5 a month, giving users access to first-run movies. The company has opened offices in Johannesburg, New York, and London; for the moment, at least, the developed world is where the money is--Iroko's venture capital and customer base alike.

Njoku is now hurrying to adapt to new channels. Just as Africans leapfrogged landlines--65% are mobile subscribers--most experts expect them to skip over PCs and consume video exclusively via mobile. Last April, Nigeria's dominant cell phone service, the South African giant MTN, began promoting an Android app called Afrinolly, which directs users to free movie streams on YouTube and other sites. Njoku says Afrinolly has infuriated his partners, the marketers, who make nothing from the arrangement and are discovering that their consumers are loath to pay for content that they can find for free.

His response? The threat of another lawsuit. He accuses Afrinolly of "illegally building their business on our content." (Afrinolly declined to comment on the claim.) Njoku says he is only protecting the interests of the industry, which cannot continue to produce the content he relies on without the revenue it generates primarily from physical sales. That sentiment hasn't kept him from experimenting with iPhone and iPad apps, which are still in development, as well as launching a platform for Nokia devices. If Iroko's future is in Africa, it's also in mobile, meaning that someday soon Njoku, too, will be competing with the anarchic marketplace of Alaba.

Three years after arriving in Lagos, an outsider in all but name, Njoku is now a Nollywood mogul. In August, he married actress Mary Remmy, star of the hit comedy Blackberry Babes, and he talks of expanding the Iroko brand into in-flight movies, satellite television, music, and other forms of entertainment. "No one is close to being our equal in Africa," Njoku says. During our lunch, when I casually mention his Netflix model, he corrects me. He's now thinking bigger.

"Viacom," he says. "We love content, and we want to figure out the best ways to do it. The Internet is just the easiest." He feels no need, anymore, to apologize for being an African company. "They always paint us with a guilty Nigerian brush, so we have to say, just look at our numbers," Njoku says. "What happens if a billion people come online? What happens to our numbers then?"[/b]
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/174/the-netflix-of-nigeria

[quote author=*Kails*]i knew my country wouldn't be on that list. [/quote]Jamaica is too beautiful to be in the list, I even knew that Nigeria wouldn't be in the list. Some of the countries they mentioned I am not surprised though, sad but true

omar22: WORD!!!!

Dont accept enough as good enough

Nollywood is still progressing so to judge them as if they are hollywood doesn't make sense

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY8wK2-Wiqg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVET0EKNkSQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwIoZKT9rOg

wales774: Assata shaukur that's tupac shakurs god mother, usa pls leave her alone,abeg.. Do know ow many blacks did d government killed that time

So true, I think America should concentrate on people that are actually going to harm them.

[quote author=baby-boy]I have lived long enough not to accept mediocre as good enough[/quote]I guess what we can agree on is we have different taste and preference's when it comes to Nollywood

pleep: There is hardly a black man on this earth who can keep money past 2 generations.

most cant even keep it past 2 decades

Black men like Aliko Dangote are showing that is changing

[b]"NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — The reward for the capture and return of a fugitive member of a black militant group convicted of murdering a New Jersey state trooper was doubled to $2 million Thursday on the 40th anniversary of the bloody gun battle.

The FBI also announced it has made Joanne Chesimard, now living in Cuba as Assata Shakur, the first woman on its list of most wanted terrorists.

"She continues to flaunt her freedom in the face of this horrific crime," State Police Superintendent Col. Rick Fuentes said at a news conference Thursday. Fuentes called the case "an open wound" for troopers in New Jersey and around the country.

The Justice Dept. has maintained a $1 million reward for information leading to her capture. The additional money is being put up by the state of New Jersey through civil and criminal forfeiture funds and won't fall on taxpayers, state Attorney General Jeffrey Chiesa said Thursday.

Chesimard, a member of the violent Black Liberation Army, was convicted of the 1973 murder of state trooper Werner Foerster during a traffic stop. The BLA was responsible for killing more than a dozen police officers in the 1970s and 80s, said Aaron Ford, special agent in charge of the FBI's Newark division.

According to Fuentes, Foerster and his partner stopped a car carrying Chesimard and two cohorts on the New Jersey Turnpike for a broken tail light. When the troopers approached the car, a gunfight ensued and both troopers were injured. Chesimard then allegedly took Foerster's gun and shot him twice in the head as he lay on the ground.

She was convicted in 1977 but escaped from prison in New Jersey in November 1979 with the help of accomplices. She spent the next few years living in safe houses, two of which were in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, before surfacing in Cuba in 1984, Fuentes said.

In Cuba, Chesimard has continued to espouse her anti-U.S. views in speeches advocating "revolution and terrorism" and may have connections to other international terrorist organizations, Ford said.

"She is a domestic terrorist who murdered a law enforcement officer execution style," he said. "And while we can't right the wrongs of the past, we can and will continue to pursue justice no matter how long it takes."

Chesimard is believed to be one of dozens of American fugitives living in Cuba, many of them one-time members of U.S. militant groups. Cuba doesn't haven an extradition agreement with the U.S. due to the chilly relations between the two countries over the last five decades, but the climate appears to be slowly changing.

In recent years, Cuba has deported some fugitives back to the U.S., including one man convicted of mail fraud and another sought on child pornography charges. This month, the country returned a Florida couple accused in a custody dispute of kidnapping their two children and sailing to Cuba.

Authorities said Thursday they hope the increased attention and reward will convince someone to come forward.

"Our resolve to capture Joanne Chesimard does not diminish with the passage of time," Chiesa said. "Instead, it grows stronger with the knowledge that this killer continues to be free. Our hope is the augmented reward will spur action that will bring Joanne Chesimard back to face the justice she has evaded for far too long."[/b]
http://news.yahoo.com/nj-troopers-killer-named-most-wanted-terrorist-150014544.html

kokoye: A lady with common sense...and she's pretty too

Men! why are we like this..blame the creator?

another issue entirely, I wouldn't blame God for it, but yes you are right she is pretty and deserves better

[b]"2013 is already looking promising for actress, Funke Akindele as she has signed an endorsement deal with Nigeria’s top jobs search website Jobberman.

HVP gathered that the deal was signed last December and would last for one year.

Funke, popularly called Jenifa will act as brand ambassador for the IT company.

It was not immediately ascertained how much she was paid, but those who were in the know said, it was a mouth-watering deal.

‘Being Nigeria’s number one Jobs website, we realised that there is a need to reach out to a set of people that are not aware of the existence and usefulness of Jobberman’, said an official of the company.

‘With over 500,000 registered users, a large number of active users of the internet are aware of Jobberman but the set of people we are targeting now basically visit Facebook and check mails only’.

Akindele, 36, is expected to appear in TV commercials and record radio ads. She will also make appearances at her Jenifa Foundation as well as Jobberman events."[/b]
http://theafricaneconomist.com/funke-akindele-nollywood-actress-signs-multimillion-deal/#.UYK4VEpv6RM

NOLLYWOOD MOVIES THAT HAVE PROGRESSED:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBmbd2-7zAI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKNF_xJfLpE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OC_un9NgnG0

[quote author=baby-boy]Its worrying a fact when the Black American movie industry would stoop so low and dable over the idea of copying a car-crash industry called Nollywood

When you look at when Black movies are at its lowest ebb this was during the late 80's early 90s, when they were cheap to make, directors like Spike Lee, John Singleton were directing movies like

She's Gotta Have It
School Daze
Do the Right Thing
Mo' Better Blues
Jungle Fever
Malcolm X
Boyz in the Hood
Poetic Justice

These are classic movies which took alot of thinking, creativity and innovation but cheap to make, movies like Juice, Jason Lyrics, Sugar Hill, New Jack City, Malcom X (Oscar nominee) are also great movies produced almost 20 years ago, which are still far better than what Nollywood has been churning out 20 years later.... Now the idea that they would adopt a fire service approach in making movies sounds laughable... Why would someone like Tyler Perry who is now worth over $200m, who is a movie or 2 away from releasing a blockbuster would stoop so low when he has the opportunity to rub shoulders with the big boys like Martin Scorsese, Spielberg, Eastwood, John Woo or Spelling.... John Singleton another one who directed one of the Fast and Furious series..........[/quote]yup but these movies are black ameircan movies, for americans not Nigerians or africans in general. Different strokes for different folks, Nollywood is still progressing and is better then how it was decades ago. I'd rather watch yoruba movies then boys N the hood.

[quote author=baby-boy]Why Nigeria's film industry can't yet square up to Hollywood
Nollywood is in a transitional phase, but its still has some way to go to be truly mainstream

A bright-green kit car marked "51 Nigeria" stands under grey skies, yards from where the traffic endlessly groans out of the Blackwall tunnel. Young black scenesters, wearing smart-casual, pose in front of it, then mill over to the red carpet in front of the Greenwich Odeon, where VoxAfrica, "the first bilingual, pan-African channel", is working the interview lineup. Tall women in traditional dress loll on benches nearby. This is the premiere of Tango with Me, the fourth Nollywood film to get a mainstream release in the UK. PR rep Moses is getting antsy; he gets the cinema to make an announcement that the screening will be starting soon. No one pays any attention. Tonight, we're on African time, not Greenwich mean time.

Nollywood, Nigeria's film industry, is straining to up its game. Tango with Me – a melodrama about the aftermath of a wedding-night rape – is the latest to reach beyond VHS and DVD-led distribution, opting for the kind of overseas theatrical release needed to help legitimise Nigerian cinema and maybe even bring in non-African audiences. The budget is high by African standards (80-100m naira – about £326,000); the film stars industry queens Genevieve Nnaji and Joke Silva as well as rising newcomer Joseph Benjamin; it has, in the eyes of director Mahmood Ali-Balogun , "the right production values" – the most salient problem for Nollywood, which likes to build them cheap and quick.

Everyone is buzzing, especially DJ Abass, "entertainment consultant" for African events in London and compere for the screening: "If you enjoy this movie, and you don't tell anyone, then I won't tell you what will happen to you. Just check your email inbox in a month's time."

I'm not sure what I'm risking by sharing this, but I kind of enjoyed Tango with Me. I admired its forthrightness about rape in Nigeria – apparently discussing it openly is still a problem – but cinematically it still felt rudimentary: too many static camera setups, lots of long, on-the-nose dialogue scenes. Maybe I'm too used to western dramatic practices, with their emphasis on subtext and tension. One thing I really enjoyed, though, was watching it with a guffawing, interjecting, gesticulating African audience. Each time Benjamin's character, Uzo, impotent with the almond-eyed Nnaji, plays away from home, some wag shouts, "Oh, Jos-eph!" in mock indignation.

At the Q&A session afterwards, there's much pontification on whether Tango with Me is the leap into the mainstream that Nollywood has been waiting for. Everyone seems to agree the industry is in a transitional phase: "The Nollywood of yesterday is different to the Nollywood of today, and it will be different to the Nollywood of tomorrow," as a producer in the audience puts it. There's certainly plenty of other evidence to suggest that it is moving on to a more established, professional footing: more film-makers shooting on film, not video; an increasing degree of international crossovers, like Jeta Amata's Hollywood star-laden Niger-delta thriller Black November, Holly-Nolly co-production Doctor Bello, and the forthcoming Nigerian-UK adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel Half of a Yellow Sun; the slick looking streaming-video library iROKOtv – supported by US money – giving ready access to Nollywood's bottomless bargain-bin of titles.

At what point does a film industry become truly mainstream? If Tango with Me is the litmus test, I'd say Nollywood isn't there yet, aesthetically at least. It's not fully exploiting the virtues of the medium yet. The declarative dialogue, some of the riper acting from the bit-parters – they feel as though they're hand-me-downs from older art forms, like oral storytelling, that Nollywood has budded out of. Sometimes, I think you can still glean that kind of folk heritage in some 1940s and 50s Hollywood films, like when comedies occasionally forgot the ruthless plot focus of commercial cinema, and let their characters revert back to gratuitous knockabout japes that feel as though they belong on the stage. That slackened, carefree vibe certainly still appears in many Bollywood films, which are on a technically higher plane than current Nollywood.

Those are the values of the commercial global mainstream, though. By another reckoning, Nollywood is already mainstream: the dominant industry of sub-Saharan Africa by virtue of pricing (dirt-cheap) and distribution (any means necessary, including piracy) arrangements in tune with Africa, where Hollywood has little or no official presence. And with the hardwood moral messages and Christian values propagated by many Nigerian films, they have a consolidated sense of their audience's identity – the very meaning of mainstream. Tango with Me is no exception, and at the Q&A, someone eagerly inquires what kind of Christian director Ali-Balogun happens to be. "Born again," he says, proudly.

But there's more than one mainstream in the world, and his eye is on the overlaps between them. "What we are going through, Hollywood went through and Bollywood went through," is how he explains the process. Nollywood, if Ali-Balogun is correct, is about to born again, too.

• Tango with Me is out on Friday. Next week's After Hollywood will focus on Dan Mintz, gatekeeper to the Chinese film industry for Hollywood. Meanwhile, what global box-office stories would you like to see covered in the column? Let us know in the comments below.[/quote]Nigeria's Nollywood eclipsing Hollywood in Africa
[b]"It's a paradox. As cinemas close across Africa, homegrown blockbusters are actually eclipsing Hollywood on the African market as for the first time in 13 years an African feature competes for the top award at Cannes.

This weekend, "A Screaming Man" by Chad director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun joins 18 other movies selected to contend for the prestigious Palme d'Or, awarded May 23 at the close of the 12-day film festival.

Yet cinemas across the continent are pulling down screens, converted to pentecostal churches, night clubs or warehouses.

The average rate of closure is estimated at one a month - an endemic trend blamed on ticket prices too high for the average African as well as on the proliferation of cheap pirated DVDs at any street corner.

Around 50 cinemas remain in business - most in South Africa and Kenya with a few in Nigeria - thanks to mushrooming city shopping malls.

In Ivory Coast, west Africa's cultural crossroads, "cinema is dying, if it is not dead already", said award-winning producer Roger Gnoan M'Bala.

In Senegal, home to some of the continent's most renowned early filmmakers such as the late Ousmane Sembene, cinemas have all but shut down. "Senegal is one big black screen," said local weekly La Gazette.

A vestige of film resistance in West Africa is the Oscars' equivalent, FESPACO, Africa's biggest film festival held every two years in Burkina Faso.

But Africa's most populous country Nigeria 18 years ago burst into production with affordable movies now shot with digital cameras that shun the more expensive classical 35mm format.

Known as Nollywood, the Nigerian movie industry has in recent years galloped ahead of Hollywood to be ranked second in the world in production terms after India's Bollywood.

A UNESCO study last year placed Nollywood second to Bollywood in terms of the numbers of films produced, with Hollywood trailing in third position. In 2006 for example, Nigeria churned out 872 productions against 485 in the United States.

Film-makers say the digital camera has helped boost African film production, with Nigerians releasing what some dub "microwave" movies that can be ready in under a month.

Nollywood "has taken over completely" from Hollywood, said Nigeria's film producer and director Teco Benson, saying it is the latest "superpower" in the movie industry.

"It's Africa's new rebranding tool".

The good news is that African film-lovers go for Nollywood.

"Africans watch more Nollywood than Hollywood," commented another local director and producer Zeb Ejiro.

Most Nollywood movies depict societal ills - corruption, fraud, drugs and human trafficking, love triangles and witchcraft - and almost all go for happy endings.

One reason for Nollywood's popularity lies with South Africa-based pay television MultiChoice. It has four 24-hour channels dedicated to African content, predominantly Nigeria productions. Two of the channels run movies in two of Nigeria's main languages, Yoruba and Hausa.

But in poor neighbourhoods, shacks with old TV screens placed on dusty alleys or verandas pass for video viewing centres. Bootleg copies sell for a couple of dollars across the continent.

In central Africa, Nollywood movies are the only ones sold by market vendors as "African movies", with the Nigerian productions dubbed into French in such countries as Cameroon and Gabon.

In Kenya, Nigerian films are also a hit - many of them broadcast on terrestrial networks - but face competition from Bollywood due to a historic large Indian population in the eastern African country.

Nollywood films are also immensely popular in Sierra Leone, to the extent of choking the growth of the country's own movie industry, said Thomas Jones, a radio play scriptwriter.

"Nollywood has hampered the growth of the local film market because my contemporaries have just resigned themselves to watching these films from Nigeria," he said.

More affluent South Africa on the other hand has seen a growth in its movie sector since the end of apartheid, and Neill Blomkamp's science fiction "District 9" was this year nominated for an Oscar.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nollywood is "very popular on television" after being dubbed into the local Lingala dialect, according to Petna Ndaliko, a local organiser of the five-year film festival in the eastern town of Goma.

And even in the tiniest of African countries such as Gambia, "Nollywood is ahead of Hollywood", said Nigerian businessman Barnabas Eset, who since 2000 has been renting out both Nollywood and Hollywood movies."[/b]
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/nigerias-nollywood-eclipsing-hollywood-in-africa-1974087.html

[quote author=tpia@]@ topic

whats the synopsis of that movie again?

i think it was about drugs, if i remember the trailer correctly.[/quote]Drugs & murder was involved in the storyline but it wasn't the synopsis of the story, the synopsis of the story was about the struggles of two african sisters from Nigeria, and their journey to America, and how America isn't as milk and honey as people think, and one sister paid for it. I never got to watch the movie but based on the research i read about the movie that is what I concluded.

here's the trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBmbd2-7zAI

Kim kardashian did the samething with Kris Humphries and stated her reasoning for it on national TV so this shouldn't be a surprise to Kanye. Maybe their child he can have power on the last name but on Kim he is wasting his time. Don't feel sorry for him, and I don't see their relationship lasting but lets hope they are good parents and role models to their future child.

Congratulations to her, now I would like her to settle down and be in more movies