EIFF 2009: Nollywood Babylon

What’s the third largest film industry in the world after Hollywood and Bollywood? No? Nollywood, of course. In less than twenty years, using cheap digital equipment and a frantic work ethic Nigerian filmmakers created a film industry out of nothing to supply videos and DVDs to the vast electronics markets of Lagos. This skeletal market model has produced a film culture with a dizzying array of genres and sub-genres; from rags-to-riches melodrama, through comedies and tales of voodoo, to evangelical morality tales. Nollywood Babylon shadows prolific director Lancelot Imasue as he works “Nollywood style” shooting 59 scenes in a day, and bravely plunges into the colour and chaos of Lagos itself. But, like the megacity whose dreams it reflects and feeds, Nollywood proves to be an overwhelmingly diffuse, shambolic and opportunistic enterprise, willed into being by the hard graft and restless invention of ordinary Nigerians, and impossible to finally pin down.