Nigeria's Nollywood: Why Nigerian Movies Still Not That Good As Their Overseas Competitors

A 15-second drum roll and the title of the film, "Deceptive Heart," comes crashing onto the screen in a groovy 1970s font.

In this photo taken Wednesday, Sept, 18. 2013, Nollywood actors perform a scene in Lagos, Nigeria.

Less than 10 minutes into the Nollywood movie, the heart of plot is revealed: A woman has two boyfriends and doesn't know what to do.

The story moves as quickly as the film appears to have been shot. Some scenes are shaky, with cameras clearly in need of a tripod, and musical montages are often filled with pans of the same building.

Most Nollywood movies are made in less than 10 days and cost about $25,000.

Fueled by low budgets and whirlwind production schedules, Nigeria's film industry has grown by some estimates over the past 20-plus years into the most prolific on Earth, pushing out more movies a year than Hollywood in California or Bollywood in Mumbai, India.

Hollywood tends to portray Africa as an exotic land of deserts and giraffes, populated by huddling masses, according to Samuel Olatunje, a Nollywood publicist known in the business as "Big Sam".

Nigerian movies are popular because they portray African people more accurately, Big Sam explains outside his single-room Lagos office.

They explore African issues rarely touched on in Hollywood – magic, tribal loyalties, the struggle to modernize.

"Stories that you can relate to," he says.

Ventures Africa business magazine says Nollywood knocks out 2,000 titles a year and is the third-largest earner in the movie world, after Bollywood and Hollywood.

The $250-million industry employs more than a million people.

Artists say Nigeria's bad infrastructure and chaotic legal system prevent them from making films that are as impressive in their quality as they are in quantity.

"You'll find that we're having to make do," legendary Nollywood actor Olu Jacobs explains at an exclusive country club in Lagos.

Trained at Britain's Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, Jacobs says Nigerian artists often have the same artistic capacity as their Western counterparts, but not the same financial capacity.

"We're not happy because the finished product doesn't have the finish that it should have," he says.

Later that day, Jacob's driver inches his car through grinding traffic in Lagos, the African megalopolis as chaotic and bustling as any Nollywood production scene.

A young businessman in an SUV nearly cuts him off. The SUV driver's eyes grow wide when he recognizes Jacobs, and he smiles like a child meeting Santa Claus. He lets the actor's car pass in front.

Nollywood was born, so the story goes, when Kenneth Nnebue, a video storeowner, had too many blank tapes in the early 1990s.
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