₦airaland Forum

[b]"Pretty actress and television personality, Jocelyn Dumas has refuted seemingly growing allegations that she is a snob and that she is not accommodating of her fans.

Showbiz celebrities owe their rise to fame to their talents, hard work and most especially their fans. Experts have said it will be suicidal for showbiz persons to ignore their fans if they want to get to the top.

There have been reports that the Adams Apples star is most often rude and always gives her fans, most especially, a cold-shoulder whenever she is approached.

“Obviously that’s a big lie,” she denied when Myjoyonline.com posed that question to her. She explained, “I am not snobbish, my fans make me who I am so I try as much as possible to be accessible to my fans.”

The allegations, Jocelyn said, she has heard but emphasized that, “the fact that sometimes you keep to yourself doesn’t necessary make you a snob, sometimes you are just being careful, there is nothing wrong with being careful …”

To her, one might not know who is real and whose is not “so you have to be a bit careful and I think that there is a fine line between being careful and being called a snob and that’s where the problem is, but no I am not a snob at all, I am very friendly, I am down to earth, I am very jovial especially jovial to a lot of my fans.”

Her jovial nature, she said, is one thing she intends not to change “just because I think that I am high and mighty because I am not, it’s just the beginning for me.”

Although she was a favourite face on television hosting television shows, such as Rhythms, Jocelyn’s popularity attained its peak when she got a role in Shirley Frimpong Manso’s ten-chapter Adams Apples as Jennifer Adams in the series.

True to her accommodating nature, she recounted instances where she had people walking up to her at the mall and at gas stations asking for photo opportunity which she gladly obliged.

“Sometimes I am driving and they ask me and I get out of my car and I take the picture. I can’t say that because I am driving I am not going to mind you. Like I said, the fans are the reason why we are here, they make me who I am, without them I don’t think that my work will be recognized … so they are my number one priority.” "[/b]
http://entertainment.myjoyonline.com/pages/news/201204/85609.php

Jocelyn Dumas
https://www.reneeqblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/renee-12.jpg

[quote author=mama-gee][size=18pt][color=deeppink]May her soul rest in peace!!![/color][/size][/quote]Amen

Damilola Adegbite
https://cdn.jaguda.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Damilola-Adegbite-on-the-runway.jpg
"The beautiful Damilola is an accomplished television and stage actress. Her first role was in theatre on the famous vagina monologues. Soon after, she did a movie titled Six Hours to Christmas. And now she's firmly set in the Nigerian Entertainment industry, she even won a Best Actress in a TV show Award in 2011, to confirm her arrival.

Damilola has a BSc in Business Administration and she'd love to one day act alongside some of Hollywood's A-Lister's. She loves driving, walking and listening to music!"
http://mnetafrica.dstv.com/2012/03/26/damilola-adegbite/

Yvonne Okoro
https://watchnigerianmoviesonline.com/files/photos/1327448889edde8b_l.jpg
"One of such talent is a lady who is filled with hidden talent up her sleeves and set to give producers reasons to have a second thought as to whom they contact to feature in their movies when she is around, that actress is Yvonne Okoro who is gradually warming herself into the hearts of movie lovers.

Not only is Yvonne beautiful, she has the talent, a good sense of humour, down to earth and a delight to watch on screen. Before she was contracted to play Ciara in the movie ‘Beyonce’ after the facial reconstructive surgery of Jackie Appiah, actress Yvonne Okoro has since been part of few movies."
http://www.ghanaliberty.com/ghananews/yvonne-okoro
http://graphic.com.gh/mirror/page.php?news=11231

Jocelyn Dumas
https://www.shadders.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/258776_10150208463372085_45164827084_7471588_598781_o.jpg
"Although she was a favourite face on television hosting television shows, such as Rhythms, Jocelyn’s popularity attained its peak when she got a role in Shirley Frimpong Manso’s ten-chapter Adams Apples as Jennifer Adams in the series."
http://www.ghanasoccernet.com/i-am-not-a-snob-%E2%80%93-jocelyn-dumas-insists/

Lydia Forson
https://www.360nobs.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/LYDIA-FORSON-ACTRESS1.jpg
"Lydia Forson's acting career started with a cameo role in Hotel St. James (2005), Run Baby Run (2006), Different Shades of Blue (2007) and a stint in the reality show The Next Movie Star in Nigeria (2007).

As an actress who believes in quality scripts, she suffered a career break after the above cameo appearances due to the quality of scripts that came her way.

Shirley Frimpong Manso, CEO of Sparrow Productions, who had previously worked with her in the hit 2006 Ghanaian television series Different Shades of Blue brought Lydia Forson back to the screens through the movie Scorned.[2] This starring role led to her first African Movie Academy Awards (AMAA) nomination as the Best Upcoming Female Actress.

In 2009, Lydia Forson starred in the multiple awards winning The Perfect Picture.[3] She has recently starred in hit movies such as A Sting in a Tale, Phone Swap and Masquerades."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Forson

Chelsea Ada Ezerioha
https://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-snc4/hs322.snc4/41573_394546100364_6395742_n.jpg
"After the role she played in Vivian Ejike’s “Silent Scandals” movie, where she acted alongside A-list actors like Genevieve Nnaji, Majid Michel, Uche Jumbo and many others, pretty Chelsea Ada Ezerioha has become one of the hottest faces in Nollywood.

Only last year, she won three awards to her credit; AMAA- Most Promising Actress award (2010) BON- Revelation of the Year award and Best Upcoming Actress award. The awards gave an edge over her contemporaries in the industry. In this encounter, Chelsea sets an agenda for herself, as she declares “ I’m undergoing a process of discovering myself.’"
http://nigeriafilms.com/news/10255/30/i-need-a-mallam-as-husband-chelsea-ezerioha.html

Sana Kanu
[img]http://4.bp..com/-t7R2hGsIvAk/TefhwWn-UJI/AAAAAAAABOo/5PreH74-7MY/s1600/IMG_1263.JPG[/img]
"Sierra Leone beauty and US based actress Hassanatu “Sana” Kanu who tied the knot with Hycinth Idibia, younger brother of 2face Idibia is making some huge moves this year.

After the bell is time for career. What will you do if you were in her shoes?

Seems like Mrs Idibia is having bundle of movie projects running and not without few of the Nollywood big names Patience Ozokwor, Kate Henshaw-Nuttall, Desmond Elliot, Jim Iyke and Ngozi Ezeonu who have laid their marks since decade."
http://teealimodels./category/sana-kanu-idibia/
http://www.becauseiamfabulous.com/2011/06/lunch-with-sierra-leonean-actress-sana.html

MRbrownJAY: for a mere £18K, smh!!!!!!!

Exactly, what is the world turning into, so sad

anonymous6: @Shynar
well for the top 5 Nigerian celebrity break-ups, I wouldn't know but this is my list so far, and it's not only for 2011:

1. 2Face and his two baby momma's(Annie Macaulay & Pero Adeniyi)
http://www.thenetng.com/2011/05/13/no-more-baby-mama-drama-for-2face/
2Face
[img]http://2.bp..com/_1uiZjBN0QmA/TU9HGCoyBGI/AAAAAAAAAH4/09WyiofAFBk/s1600/2_Face.jpg[/img]
Annie Macaulay
[img]http://searchafrica.files./2010/11/annie-macaulay.jpg[/img]
Pero Adeniyi
[img]http://1.bp..com/_u3lFqBksmrE/StOFyYLuXEI/AAAAAAAAYCY/jwRiydPBF9g/s400/25.jpg[/img]


2. Funke Akindele ruined Femi Adebayo's marriage
Some say it's a rumor and some say it really happened
http://nigeriafilms.com/news/12629/2/how-funke-akindele-jenifa-ruined-femi-adebayos-mar.html
http://myyorubamovie.com/funke-akindele-sets-for-marriage-denies-femi-adebayo/
Funke Akindele & Femi Adebayo
[img]http://1.bp..com/_u3lFqBksmrE/SkKrJ32F-GI/AAAAAAAAVUE/XFOFyEM15H8/s400/4769_118217403857_549718857_2938439_4573537_n.jpg[/img]

3. Genevieve Nnaji and D'banj
first we hear they are going out, then we hear it's a lie, then we hear they are just friends, then we hear they broke up, you make your choice which you believe but I have a feeling something happened between them
http://news2.onlinenigeria.com/headlines/17300-Genevieve-Denies-Dbanj-Says-Hes-Not-Kind-Man.html
Genevieve Nnaji & D'banj
https://liveofofo.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/dbanji-genevive.jpg

4. Stella Demasus & Emeka Nzeribe
http://questionmarkmag.com/2011/01/stella-damascus-back-in-love/
Stellas's late husband(Aboderin)/Stella/Stella's ex-husband(Emeka Nzeribe)-her second husband
https://photos.peacefmonline.com/photos/news/200912/176639131_731183.jpg
http://showbiz.peacefmonline.com/movies/200912/34556.php

5. Peter of P-Square and his baby momma(Lola Omotoya)
first they are together & have a kid, they break up with each other, then we hear they are still together, then you hear they are not married or together but respect each other for the child. I don't know about these two, all I know is both of them are confused and don't seem like a couple to me as far as I am concerned because their actions are different from what they say out of their mouth
http://naijaura.com/thestyle/2011/05/wife-of-peter-p-square-delivers-baby-boy/
http://lindaikeji..com/2008/04/lola-omotayo-opens-up-on-love-affair.html
http://updateintel..com/2011/05/lola-omotayo-and-peter-okoye-of-p.html
Peter(P-Square) & Tola Omotayo
[img]http://2.bp..com/_IfL2RoqAOoQ/RnaumFqxygI/AAAAAAAAAvc/CMInvkYenBo/s400/1lolaandpeter.jpg[/img]

Update Funke akindele is now engaged
https://www.nairaland.com/939329/picture-funke-akindele-fiance-alhaji

[b]"26-year-old Meenakshi Thapar was allegedly kidnapped and beheaded by two of her co-stars in what seems to be a story straight out of a horror movie.

Amit Jaiswal and girlfriend Preeti Surin, whom the actress met on the set of her latest movie 'Heroin', heard of her family's wealth and soon hatched a plan to kidnap her.

The couple then invited Meenakshi on a trip to Gorakhpur where they held her hostage and demanded 1.5 million rupees(£18.000) from her parents. They even threatened to force the Bollywood actress into pornography if their demands were not met.

Ms Thapar's mum transfered 60.000 rupees into her daughter's account for the kidnappers to withdraw but that wasn't good enough because shortly after that, she was strangled and beheaded.

One of the detectives working on the case told The Telegraph this"

"She was strangulated in a hotel and her body was hacked into pieces and thrown in a water tank. They threw her head from a moving bus while travelling back to Mumbai.”


So sad. R.I.P Meenakshi Thapar. "[/b]
http://www.yenihsworld.com/2012/04/bollywood-actress-meenakshi-thapar.html
http://www.leadership.ng/nga/articles/22525/2012/04/20/bollywood_actress_kidnapped_beheaded_costars.html

[img]http://1.bp..com/-FbUUCGMBjwg/T5FjldECXhI/AAAAAAAAEUo/KRrC0UI47dc/s400/meenakshi-thapar.jpg[/img]

"Some of our Nigerian and Ghanaian celebs recently posed in a special photoshoot for Africa Magic,the No1 channel in Africa. R&Beats singer Tiwa Savage was one of them.

The gorgeous Nigerian diva posed in a beautiful brown print long gown. Mehhnnn this girl doesn't need to try hard to be sexy. She just oozes sexiness...and class"
http://www.yenihsworld.com/2012/04/damnnn-tiwa-savage-takes-beautiful.html

Tiwa Savage
[img]http://1.bp..com/-6_J_x8Rdm08/T5Cf5abxuvI/AAAAAAAAEYo/R_WjP8MxWLE/s640/TIWA-SAVAGE-1-399x600.jpg[/img]

[quote author=life_style]Known for his roles in "Lost" and "Oz," Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje is now telling a far more important story -- his own. The actor is making a film entitled "Farming" about the practice followed by many Nigerian parents in 1960s and '70s Britain of having children informally fostered. Akinnuoye-Agbaje, 44, was raised in such a situation, making for a fascinating life story, which included the shocking revelation that he became a skinhead as a teenager in an attempt to fit in.


When he was six weeks old, his parents – a Nigerian couple studying in London – gave him to a white working-class couple in Essex, he says in a new interview with The Guardian. He lived in his foster home with more than 10 other African children, including his two sisters. The climate at the time was such that he grew up fearful of being physically attacked because of his skin color. And although he was black, Akinnuoye-Agbaje thought of himself as white and developed a fear of his own race. So much so that when he occasionally saw black sailors in his town, which had a naval dockyard, he would run away from them. "I just remember being petrified," he said. "It was as if they were the bogey man to us. Fish and chips and corned beef, that's what I knew."

When he was 8, his biological parents arrived unexpectedly and took him and his sisters to Nigeria. He couldn't speak the language and had trouble fitting in, so his parents became frustrated and sent him back to England – without his siblings – a year later. Settling back into life with his foster family took its toll and he had what he called a cultural identity crisis. "I wanted to assimilate and go back to the abnormal normality I knew," he told The Guardian. "I wanted to wash off the experience of Africa but obviously I couldn't because that's who I was."


As a teenager, Akinnuoye-Agbaje turned to violence to defend himself, but he also attacked others. "It was a time of standing up and standing your ground or running, and there wasn't anywhere to run," he said. "The local skinhead gang really ran the streets. They made my life – and anyone's who was a shade darker than pale – a misery."

So he made a drastic decision – he became a skinhead. Not only did he take on the look of one, shaving his head and wearing the clothes, but he adopted the racist attitudes as well. And he fought alongside them as what he described as a brutalized animal that was unleashed in battle. "When a child wants to be accepted, he'll do anything," he explained. "And if it means you're getting a certain amount of notoriety from a fight, that's what you'll do. If all you've known is racism, abuse and persecution, then all of a sudden you're getting some recognition, that's your new drug. That's what you want. By the time I was 16 I was someone to reckon with. I was so eager to repudiate any connection with any immigrant race I would go above and beyond. I was desperate to belong to something. That was my drive as a teenager."

Unable to control him and worried he would influence the other children in their home, Akinnuoye-Agbaje's foster parents reached out to his real parents, who had him shipped off to boarding school in Surrey. Initially a difficult transition, he suffered from self-hatred and even attempted suicide, he gradually got on the right track. Becoming diligent with his studies, he later received a law degree. While in school he started modeling which brought him around the globe and to Hollywood, where he eventually was cast as Mr. Eko on ABC's "Lost" and then Simon Adebisi in the HBO series "Oz."

In addition to making "Farming," Akinnuoye-Agbaje's next role is in the upcoming series "Hunted." The show stars Melissa George as an espionage operative for a private intelligence agency and Akinnuoye-Agbaje plays her boss. It will premiere later this year.

http://tv.yahoo.com/news/why-black--lost--actor-became-a-skinhead.html[/quote]interesting interview, I knew some what of his history but not to this detail though

franel79: Yeah, He's cute, tall, soft spoken and the ideal every woman's dream of a man.

so true

timmy1999: Cantell or what do they call u..
What with the attitude..why calling me names
Am not a tribalist and I will never be one..
Its the fact am trying to point out
That's the reason nollywood film will never win the oscars award. its poor budget,low quality can never compete with the best..nollywood is the second largest film industry in the world..they have nothing to show for it..south africa , egypt film av won oscars for their efforts...so wat are we talking about
Did u get it now .. mrs cantella...

Nobody remembers those oscar winners though from Egypt(which is not a black african country) and south africa which is controlled by white south africans; wasn't the movie from south africa made from a white south african. You are right budget, quality and etc is a problem for Nollywood however being slowly being combated and Bollywood had the same beginning as well and progressed, but the ones being known when it comes to Africa are not the winners of Oscars from the Arab country of Egypt(which doesn't count) or south africa. Apparently Nollywood has something to show for since they have been interviewed by the New york times and CNN multiple times, including documentaries. So it depends on the way you look at it. The bitter truth is the Oscars will never put Africa out there for Black africans or Africans on the map, they may acknowledge a movie from a person from a arab nation in Africa or south africa(that represents themselves not Africa) but they don't represent Sub-Saharan Africa like Nollywood does. The Oscars is not the savor for Black africans and will never be, it helps to win a oscar though but doesn't represent a demographic.

[quote author=baby-boy]People make loads of fuss about nothing didnt Sophie Okenedo play in Hotel Rwanda the last time I checked that she is not a Hutu or Tusti, Kerry Washington in Last King of Scotland she's american... at the end of the day he who blows the piper controls the tune. The funding of the film is not coming from Nigeria and the cinema viewers are mostly Americans, thats why the want PROFESSIONALS [/quote]That's where it boils down to really, this movie no matter what will be a Hollywood movie, nobody from Nollwyood is funding it what so ever so nobody should complain. This is what Hollywood always does, that is the sad truth

[quote author=Elody-Ann]Why are there no white actors in Nigeria? Why go to another country and complain about lack of opportunities there then disallow people from other races from acting in your films? Why are all the actors Nigerian?[/quote]because Nigeria is a Black African country and Nollywood represents the culture & people of the tribes of Nigeria for the most part, you don't see whites running around in Nigeria every 2 seconds, do you?, when it comes to Nigerians in America, they don't complain about not having opportunities in Hollywood, it is African Americans that do that, which they have a right to. So your complaint is rubbish

[b]"I confess that I have never been able to finish Chimamanda Adichie’s second novel, “Half of a Yellow Sun,” set during the Biafran War in the late 1960s. (Btw, it won high praise from mainstream Western critics. See here, here and here.) By the time I finally do finish it, the film version will probably be in theaters. The Nigerian-British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor (highlights: Dirty Pretty Things and Inside Man) has already agreed to star in the film adaptation, alongside with Dominic Cooper (Captain America). This week Screen Daily reported that Zimbabwean-Brit actress Thandi Newton (credits: Crash, Mission Impossible) will be a female lead. Not everyone is happy with the choice of Newton as a female lead. There’s already a strange online petition to have Newton replaced with a Nigerian actress. The petition notes, among others, that “… Igbo people do not look like the bi-racial Thandie Newton.” You can read similar comments on posts about Newton’s casting at the popular film blog Shadow and Act here and here.

* Btw, separate from casting issues, the previous credits of the two producers of “Half of a Yellow Sun” include “The Last King of Scotland” and “The Constant Gardener,” both films noted for their problematic treatments of African subjects. As for Ejiofor, he has played Africans on screen before. In “Dirty Pretty Things” he was excellent as an African migrant caught up in the goings on at a seedy London hotel, while in the not-so-good “Red Dust“ he played an activist appearing before South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He has also played Thabo Mbeki in the made-for-TV movie “Endgame.”[/b]
http://africasacountry.com/2012/01/27/half-of-a-yellow-sun/

Thandie Newton
https://images.askmen.com/galleries/actress/thandie-newton/pictures/thandie-newton-picture-2.jpg

Yoruba all the way

Abagworo: I doubt if you live in Africa or you've actually visited Yorubaland. In Africa we have three types of marriage. The court marriage, the Church marriage and the traditional marriage. All can be skipped except the traditional marriage which is the most cherished. We wear African attires on our traditional marriage day and not suits and gowns.

If you and your partner go to court and Church alone for your wedding, people in your hometown will consider your marriage illegitimate but you can do the traditional alone and will be accepted.

Cosign 100%, I agree, you forgot introduction as well

onila: nice thread

Thanks, post some videos you like as well that you think are up to standard

VIDEO: "The making of Nigeria's Film Industry"
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2012/02/23/magazine/100000001378151/nollywood-heights.html

[b]"Kunle Afolayan wants to scare you, he wants to thrill you, he wants to make you laugh, but most of all, he would like you to suspend your disbelief — in his plots, yes, which tend to be over the top, but also about what is possible in Africa. He bristles if you call him an “African filmmaker” — a phrase redolent of art-house cinema, which his work assuredly is not. He wants to make huge, explosive, American-style blockbusters, and he wants to make them where he lives — in Nigeria. His ambitions may sound implausible. Nigeria lacks even a reliable supply of electricity. But it does contain a chaotic creative energy that has made it the world’s most prolific producer of films.

Twenty years after bursting from the grungy street markets of Lagos, the $500 million Nigerian movie business churns out more than a thousand titles a year on average, and trails only Hollywood and Bollywood in terms of revenues. The films are hastily shot and then burned onto video CDs, a cheap alternative to DVDs. They are seldom seen in the developed world, but all over Africa consumers snap up the latest releases from video peddlers for a dollar or two. And so while Afolayan’s name is unknown outside Africa, at home, the actor-director is one of the most famous faces in the exploding entertainment scene known — inevitably — as “Nollywood.”

On a continent where economies usually depend on extracting natural resources or on charity, moviemaking is now one of Nigeria’s largest sources of private-sector employment. Walls around Lagos are plastered with posters reading, “Actors/Actresses Wanted.” Nollywood stars are everywhere, from billboards to glossy tabloids filled with pictures of red-carpet events. The African Movie Academy Awards, held each year in the oil-rich Niger Delta region, have become a lavish spectacle, drawing visitors like Forest Whitaker and Danny Glover. Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, has recruited Nollywood stars to campaign with him, while Afolayan and others have lent prominent support to a protest movement called “Occupy Nigeria.”

And yet most of the movies themselves are awful, marred by slapdash production, melodramatic acting and ludicrous plots. Afolayan, who is 37, is one of a group of upstart directors trying to transcend those rote formulas and low expectations. His breakthrough film, the 2009 thriller “The Figurine,” was an aesthetic leap: while no viewer would confuse it with “Citizen Kane,” to Nigerians it announced the arrival of a swaggering talent keen to upset an immature industry. Unlike most Nollywood fare, “The Figurine” was released in actual theaters, not on cheap discs, playing to packed houses next to Hollywood features. “Many observers,” Jonathan Haynes, a scholar of Nollywood, recently wrote, “have been waiting a long time for this kind of filmmaking, which can take its place in the international arena proudly and on equal terms.”

In contrast to Nollywood’s chiseled leading men, Afolayan is stout, speaks with a laid-back drawl and has a noticeable scar on one side of his face from a car accident. But he has undeniable charisma — a quality his admirers say he inherited from his father, an actor and legendary playboy. One sticky August night, I accompanied Afolayan on a prowl through Lagos, weaving through the metropolis in his monstrous pickup truck. We ended up at an open-air nightclub called King Sized, where heads turned as he made his entrance with a boisterous entourage. In West Africa, a famous presence demands recognition, so the resident highlife band swiftly shifted into an impromptu praise song. “Kunle Afolayan,” the vocalist began to trill, “Kunle Afolayan is here!”

As the singer celebrated his name, Afolayan nonchalantly sipped from a sweaty beer bottle. This was a scripted ritual; the entertainment didn’t come free. The chorus reached a crescendo as Afolayan, dressed in faded jeans and bursting from a sheer white shirt, came forward with a huge stack of Nigerian banknotes. He began to dance, shaking his hips and moving his feet, casting off bills with fluid flicks of his wrist — a tribute Nigerians call “spraying.” A band member crawled around, scooping up cash, while Afolayan delighted in the adulation.

When I visited Lagos, Afolayan was preparing to start shooting his follow-up to “The Figurine.” He told me he hoped to emulate his hero, Mel Gibson, another actor-director from a remote English-speaking land with outsize appetites and ambitions. “It’s sad,” Afolayan said of Gibson’s recent self-destruction. “I love Mel and I’m such a fan of his work.” He was quick to distance himself from Nollywood and its streetwise art of “guerrilla filmmaking.” “Their mind-set,” Afolayan said, “is totally different than mine.”

For all of Afolayan’s grandiose talk, however, the economic realities of African filmmaking conspire against an improvement in quality. The consumer base is huge — there are more than a billion Africans, 155 million of them in Nigeria alone. But access to those buyers is controlled by the clannish merchants who congregate on the outskirts of Lagos at the Alaba International Market, the distribution hub of the African movie business.

To visit Alaba is to catch a glimpse of entertainment in its Hobbesian state, where few laws restrain profiteers, piracy is rampant and all creative calculations yield to the lowest denominator. The market’s cramped concrete stalls are piled high with video CDs packaged in garish paper envelopes. Men pulling carts laden with boxes jostle through unpaved alleyways, passing under flapping banners advertising new releases like “Mama’s Girls” and “Demonic Attack.” Castoff plastic discs, the detritus of digital replication, litter the muddy ground like seashells.

This may not be quite what Jean-Luc Godard had in mind when he recently declared that with digital cameras, “everyone is now an auteur.” But it certainly represents a vision of what the future could hold — and not just for Nigeria — if the practice of making entertainment ceases to be rewarding to professionals. Even as Afolayan tossed off cash for his song, he faced a vexing challenge in making his next film: who was going to pay for his work? When everyone is an auteur, who values artistry?

On a Saturday afternoon, in the last hour of precious daylight, Osita Iheme was ready to work. A dwarf popularly known as Paw Paw, and the star of a string of politically incorrect hits with titles like “Baby Police,” Iheme is one of Nollywood’s most bankable actors. In his latest film, an ensemble comedy set in cramped slum housing, he was playing the lecherous son of a landlord. The director, working with a single Sony digital camera, watched the scene unfold on a beat-up TV monitor. It involved a scatological sight gag, a confrontation with a gaggle of female tenants and lots of screaming. Iheme set his face in an exaggerated glower as the actor playing the landlord wagged his finger and bellowed, “You have turned my place into a market square for madwomen!”

Nollywood’s bawdy humor — or fright or fantasy — appeals to a public seeking escape from depressing living conditions. The industry itself was born out of economic desperation during the early 1990s, a period of military dictatorship, low prices for Nigeria’s oil and Western-mandated “structural adjustment” of its economy. Actors and cameramen were out of work because of budget cuts at the national television station. Movie theaters were closed because no one wanted to venture into the dangerous streets at night. According to legend, the first Nollywood movie was made by a small-time electronics trader named Kenneth Nnebue, who, stuck with a large shipment of blank videotapes, decided to unload them by making a movie about a man who sells his soul for wealth. That movie, “Living in Bondage,” sold hundreds of thousands of copies and established Nollywood’s archetypal plot elements: martial discord, greed, a conflict between Christianity and juju, as the occult is called in West Africa. From these accidental origins, a cultural phenomenon emerged.

Other merchants, overwhelmingly members of Nnebue’s ethnic group, the Igbo, followed him into business. They literally made things up as they went, shooting movies in just a few days, based on vague scenarios instead of scripts. Directors approximated tracking shots by pushing their cameramen around in wheelchairs. Quality was shaky, but the buying public didn’t care. Between 1994 and 2005, production in Nigeria went from a handful of feature movies a year to more than 2,500.

“We watch these Africa films like ‘Blood Diamond’ and ‘The Last King of Scotland’ — they’re always from the perspective of the Europeans,” says Lancelot Oduwa Imasuen, who has directed more than 160 features. He was the subject of a documentary called “Nollywood Babylon,” which was shown at the Sundance Film Festival, and he told me that when he went to the festival, he was shocked to discover that some American directors had been working for years to make just one movie.

Kenneth Nnebue quit Nollywood a few years ago, retiring to his village to devote his life to preaching the Bible. But the industry he established remains tightly controlled by the same group of Igbo businessmen, an insular guild sometimes called the Alaba cartel.

Afolayan’s father, known as Ade Love, was a leading man in the Nigerian film scene of the 1970s, until it was ruined by economic collapse. Up to his death in 1996, he warned his son away from show business, pushing him into a stable career in banking, and although Afolayan eventually went against his father’s wishes, he absorbed the bitter lesson that artistic aspirations mean little without a sustainable business model. As things stand now, moviemakers must sell a huge volume of discs, very quickly, in order to turn a profit. Pirates — taking advantage of the same mass-replication technology that made Nollywood possible in the first place — almost immediately rip off any popular new release. So the black market effectively sets everyone’s prices.

To make the more costly kind of films he envisions, Afolayan has been compelled to devise a strategy that goes around Alaba. “They’re just businesspeople,” Afolayan says dismissively. “They could not really care less about content.” In an evolutionary inversion, his strategy depends on theaters, which have returned to Nigeria along with democracy and the global oil boom. Movie tickets have become a fashionable indulgence for Lagos’s expanding population of prosperous professionals. It is in this privileged world — not the slums — that Afolayan’s movie “The Figurine” takes place. Since its sensational release, people have begun to speak of an emerging movement — New Nollywood — that has captivated a new generation of would-be filmmakers.

My visit coincided with a monthlong program, conducted by the New York Film Academy, that was training 250 Nigerian students in the rudiments of professional technique. I sat in on a shoot for “Awakening,” being made by some earlier graduates of the program, well-educated strivers in their 20s, some of whom had quit good jobs at banks or telecommunications companies to devote themselves to the project. The director, James Omokwe, said that he had seen “The Figurine” twice and wanted to follow its lead into the theaters. “We don’t have the money to finish the movie,” Omokwe added, cheerfully. “But we will definitely do it somehow.”

Many established Nigerian directors are also making big plans for the big screen, with big budgets, and they all seem to have a part for Danny Glover. One night I took a glass elevator up to the Silverbird Cinema, an American-style mall multiplex in a nouveau riche section of Lagos. After paying about $7 — an exorbitant sum in Nigeria — I watched “The Mirror Boy,” a hot New Nollywood release. It was about an African boy, raised in Britain, who returns home and ends up on a long quest through the jungle, accompanied by a ghostly guide, played by Osita Iheme. The production values were far superior to anything I had seen on video, but the movie still climaxed in Nollywood’s customary blaze of sorcery, inspiring one audience member to shout out, “Africa!”

Nollywood movies, both old and new, often play on traditional African beliefs about magic and spirits. “The Figurine” is about two young university graduates — rivals for the same woman’s affections — who stumble on a shrine and uncover the statue of a god. The figurine is supposed to grant seven years of good luck, followed by seven of misfortune. Afolayan’s character brings it home to Lagos, wins the girl and great wealth, at which point the plot takes a horror-genre turn.

“That’s the figurine,” Afolayan said one day at his office, pointing to a carved wooden prop on his shelf. By this point, I was starting to wonder about the fortune it had brought Afolayan. His follow-up film, “Phone Swap,” was supposed to be shooting. But just a few days before, one of its stars, a beloved character actor named Sam Loco Efe, dropped dead while shooting another movie. The newspapers were filled with condolences, as well as speculation that the veteran actor might have been killed by overwork.

“Phone Swap” was supposed to be a humorous and commercially appealing diversion. Instead it was threatening to become a debacle. As usual, Afolayan had to contend with the absence of vital equipment, decent roads, reliable electricity. He had abruptly dropped his leading man for cantankerous behavior. Now came the untimely death of Sam Loco. “I was just so devastated,” Afolayan said, telling me that the day before he had quit work early to curl up and watch romantic comedies.

Afolayan also handles the financial side of his productions, and “Phone Swap” was conceived with an eye toward product placement, though the cellphone company originally involved had backed out. The story involves a pair of opposites, a free-spirited single girl from the country and a serious Lagos businessman who end up enmeshed in each other’s lives after they mix up their phones. The plot was made to appeal to Nigeria’s new elite, for whom the BlackBerry is a totem as powerful as any figurine. Sam Loco was supposed to play the female lead’s father, an Igbo farmer.

One morning, while he considered replacements for Sam Loco, Afolayan assembled his key crew members to scout locations in the town of Badagry, near the Benin border. We left before dawn to avoid Lagos’s paralyzing traffic jams. Badagry sits along a route often used by smugglers, and there were police roadblocks along the way. But Afolayan blew right through them in his big truck, shouting, “Are you crazy?” at one cop who tried to step in front. The town, an old slaving port, was meant to stand in for an Igbo village. From the back seat, the art director Pat Nebo, an Igbo, gave a lecture on the group’s customs and agricultural practices, lots of painstaking talk about palm oil and kola nuts. “Don’t forget this is a comedy film,” Afolayan gently reminded him.

We came to the small concrete house that would serve as the set of the farm. “It’s so dirty,” Afolayan said happily. Everyone walked through its dank main hallway, which smelled of smoke and fish, into a sandy backyard where laundry flapped in the wind. “Fantastic, this is brilliant,” said the cinematographer Yinka Edward, as he began conceptualizing an ambitious crane shot.

“The house becomes a major character of the film,” Nebo pronounced, before heading off to scout for appropriate livestock.

Afolayan’s budget for “Phone Swap,” around $500,000, was tiny by Hollywood standards but Spielberg-size for Nigeria. Before embarking on the project, Afolayan went to potential investors with a 29-page business plan, discussing everything from plot details to the fees for equipment rentals and actors. He managed to entice an investor to pledge $1.5 million, enough to finance his next three films. But as deadlines neared, the money still had not appeared. He handed over his BlackBerry so I could read a series of progressively more frustrated e-mail messages. “Most of these investors, they just think business,” Afolayan said. “They don’t really understand the ethic of production.”

Of course, profit motives drove the development of the medium long before pretensions of artistry. The first American movies were disdained by respectable society, but the price of admission — 5 cents, hence the term “nickelodeon” — made them popular with working-class audiences. One day in 1906, an unemployed clothing merchant named Carl Laemmle, who was thinking about starting a five-and-dime, happened to walk into a packed Chicago nickelodeon. “It was evident that the basic idea of motion pictures and Mr. Woolworth’s innovation were identical,” Laemmle later wrote, “small-price commodity in tremendous quantities.” Laemmle started his own theater, and eventually expanded into producing content, founding Universal Pictures.

The businessmen behind Nollywood have followed a similar path from upstart to mogul. In the absence of strong legal institutions, Nigeria’s movie marketers formed a guild to govern their industry, colluding to regulate supply and production costs. The guild has resisted all attempts by actors and producers to push for a larger share of revenue.

“We created the industry,” Gab Okoye, a marketer who goes by the name Gabosky, proudly said one afternoon. We were standing near the red carpet outside a Lagos banquet hall, where the local chapter of the guild was about to inaugurate new officers. To celebrate and pay homage, all of old Nollywood had turned out in its flashiest finery, lots of bright ankara cloth and dark sunglasses. Gabosky, who was wearing a hip-hop-inspired ensemble, told me he felt disrespected by the new filmmakers like Afolayan. He called them “houseboys” who had forgotten their place. “He’s started complaining about his master,” he said, “who was giving him a job yesterday.”

Inside, the powerful guild president, Emmanuel Isikaku, took the stage. “Nollywood is still alive,” he told the audience. “Nollywood is still great.” The defensive tenor of his declaration was indicative of the marketers’ mood. They had built an entertainment enterprise without precedent in Africa, and yet they felt unappreciated and besieged. The government was trying to crack down with increased fees and oversight. The event’s written program warned of the calamity of regulation and maligned Nigerian actors as “lazy.” When stars become too demanding, marketers deal with them ruthlessly. A few years ago, they put several prominent actors on a blacklist, and none were allowed to work, according to a guild official, until they begged forgiveness.

The marketers say they can’t afford the extravagances of talent. The production budget for a typical Nollywood movie ranges between $25,000 and $50,000, less than a tenth of what Afolayan was proposing for “Phone Swap.” The marketers contend that spending more would be foolish, because the low price of Nollywood movies is part of their appeal. “You must first identify who your primary market is,” Isikaku, a shrewd and sinewy operator, told me. “If your primary audience is the elites and the middle class, the people that can go to the cinema, fine, well and good. But there are some programs that are meant for the people on the street.”

Richmond Ezihe, the guild boss at Alaba market, tried to explain Nollywood economics to me. We met one afternoon in front of the stall that serves as the base for his company. Pasted to its metal door was a poster for a recent feature, “Palace of Blood.” When Ezihe, who is the financier and executive producer, comes up with the concept for a movie, he gives it to a couple of screenwriters he keeps on retainer and then hires a director to hurriedly shoot, having the film ready for sale on the Alaba market within a month or two.

Ezihe has a number of ways to monetize his product: there’s a satellite television station, an overseas DVD market catering to the African diaspora and even a Netflix-inspired Web site called Nollywood Love. But most revenues still come from physical sales. It costs less than 20 cents to burn a blank VCD and package it, but the wholesale price for movies is so cheap that a marketer might need to sell 100,000 copies just to make a decent return. The average Nollywood movie has a shelf life of about two weeks before the pirates get hold of it. In Nigeria, an estimated 5 to 10 illegal VCDs are sold for every legitimate one, and the police make no serious effort to deter the trade.

“It really has eaten deep into our finances,” Ezihe said, claiming — as did every other marketer I met — to be mystified about the identity of the troublesome scofflaws. “They’re hiding,” he said. In fact, clues as to the pirates’ whereabouts were strewed all around Alaba, where American movies and TV series, rap music and video games of doubtful provenance were selling next to the latest Nollywood hits. Many of the movie marketers originally got into the business by pirating Hollywood movies, a practice that continues to flourish. “Piracy is not a problem with the system,” said Jade Miller, an academic at Tulane University who has researched Nollywood’s economics. “It is the system, essentially.”

The legal and illegal industries continue to operate in parallel, within an opaque system of relationships and rules set by the Alaba cartel, Emeka Mba, head of Nigeria’s efforts to regulate the film industry, told me. “The pirates, they know them — it’s part of them,” he said. The marketers seldom use lawyers, accountants or written contracts; when they make a film, it is often unclear who even holds the copyright. When Mba’s agency tried to impose some legal order, for instance mandating that marketers register under a postal address, he met brutal resistance. Anti-piracy raids, though rare, have sparked violent uprisings at Alaba.

Isikaku did not deny that there were pirates in his membership’s midst, but he claimed that guild leaders were trying to confront them, sometimes physically, sometimes with persuasion. But the reality is that when everyone is stealing, you have to price like a pirate.

Carl Laemmle might have recognized the marketers’ situation. When he started Universal, he immediately came into conflict with Thomas Edison, who held patents on movie cameras and projectors. Edison had been waging a legal battle against “dupers,” unauthorized copyists who would take a film and redistribute it, often just snipping off the copyright frames. As Edison saw it, his intellectual property rights gave him a monopoly on all film production. He went after Laemmle, too, filing some 289 lawsuits against him and dispatching goons to break up his film shoots.

Laemmle responded by organizing some other “independents,” a handful of mostly Jewish movie producers who operated out of New York. In 1917, they defeated Edison in the Supreme Court. But by that time the independents had already moved en masse out to California, where they could shoot in sunny weather, away from the chill of legal scrutiny. “They were pirates!” says Bic Leu, a Fulbright fellow who has studied Nollywood. “They moved to L.A. to get away from Thomas Edison.”

One evening at a hotel bar, I happened to run into a Nigerian-born actor named Wale Ojo. We got to talking, and he said that after scraping by for years in London, he returned to try his luck back home. A few days thereafter, in a true Nollywood twist, I met Ojo a second time, when Afolayan introduced him to me as the new lead actor in “Phone Swap.” Afolayan had us over one Sunday evening to drink wine by his poolside, along with some friends from the industry and a couple of international film buffs.

“Black British actors are cheap right now,” Ojo said.

“Good,” Afolayan replied. “Because I don’t have the money to pay you.”

Afolayan had also come up with an actor to take Sam Loco’s role, so everything was in place for “Phone Swap” — except the financing, which remained frustratingly elusive. The director kept offering self-confident assurances that his backer would come through. But anyone could tell that, all quips aside, he was anxious.

Perversely, the rise of video, which had given Afolayan the ability to practice his father’s craft, had also robbed it of its value. His career represents a possibly rash wager: that even in the most lawless marketplace, talent is still worth a premium. When he started to make “The Figurine,” announcing on Facebook that he planned to spend 50 million naira, roughly $350,000, the universal reaction was incredulity. Afolayan told me: “Everybody started writing, saying, ‘How will you make your money? You want to commit suicide?’ ” To pay for “The Figurine,” Afolayan took out a bank loan for half the budget, pledging his house as collateral, and subsidized another third of the movie through product placement.

“Kunle was out to make a statement, that it was possible to make a good film in this country using local hands,” Yinka Edward said. When he ran out of money at one point, stalling production, Afolayan borrowed from family and friends and asked his cast and crew to keep working on good faith.

His efforts appeared to receive vindication in the box-office performance of “The Figurine.” But the triumphal narrative breaks down when you examine the financials. For all its acclaim, Afolayan said that “The Figurine” had yet to turn a substantial profit. The movie showed to packed houses, but there are just seven major theaters in Nigeria, and it grossed only around $200,000 in its initial release, not enough to cover Afolayan’s investment.

To maximize revenues, Afolayan made a deal with an independent entertainment company that was having encrypted DVDs of “The Figurine” shipped in from China for mass distribution. The executive handling the project told me that his plan was to simultaneously release a huge number of copies across the country, so as not to create scarcity, which encourages piracy. Then he drew a diagram of his network, each strand of which ended with some regional marketer. There was just no way to circumvent the unyielding force of the cartel. Emeka Mba, the government regulator, told me that he saw Afolayan’s efforts to devise a new distribution system as an inspirational experiment. “Here’s a guy who wants to do things differently,” he said. “Here is a guy who is brave.”

After weeks of waiting for his nervous investor, Afolayan called his editor and sidekick, Steve Sodiya, into his office and said he had decided to move forward. “I want to start with my own money,” Afolayan told him. “We have to start the shoot. I’ve been making a backup plan.” It involved some financing from product placement, and a large personal endorsement contract — from a cellphone company. His production company’s office, sleepy for days, was suddenly abuzz with frantic preparation: costumes, casting, equipment rentals. Afolayan spent an afternoon in last-minute negotiations to knock down everyone’s fees. “You think I am not resourceful?” he shouted at one resistant crew member.

In the final week of August, “Phone Swap” finally began shooting in Badagry. Afolayan presided over the shoot from a canvas director’s chair. The week before, local meteorologists warned of an epic rainstorm, but this time luck was with him. One evening, on the shabby farmhouse set, Wale Ojo, who was playing the uncomfortable city slicker, positioned himself for his first scene, and Afolayan shouted, “Action!”

Weeks later, after shooting wrapped, Afolayan e-mailed me a clip of the rushes and informed me that he was “dead broke.” A trailer, featuring a scene in an airplane cabin painstakingly recreated by Pat Nebo, built anticipation when it hit YouTube in November. The movie is scheduled to have its premiere over the next two months in Lagos, Accra and London. Already, though, Afolayan is planning his next film, which he calls a passion project. He told me something about it while I was in Lagos. Sitting in his unlit office one rainy day, he excitedly explained that it would be about a dead man who walks the earth, refusing to admit his condition. He said he hoped to land Danny Glover for a big part. “I’m creating two worlds,” Afolayan told me. “The land of the dead and the land of the living.” It seemed impolite to interrupt to ask when the office’s electricity might return"[/b]
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/magazine/nollywood-movies.html?pagewanted=all

Good question, I always thought it was weird but understood that it was sort of something that was always done since getting independence from the British but to me personally I don't think it is necessary though.