Nollywood: The Making of a Film Empire

Columbia Global Reports

by Emily Witt

How did Nigeria create the second largest movie industry in the world?

Nollywood began in Nigeria in the 1990s and has grown into the second largest film industry in the world in the number of films produced annually, behind only Bollywood and ahead of Hollywood. Reporter Emily Witt travels to Nigeria to offer a vivid, rollicking tour of the industry today. She meets with young filmmakers and actors trying to break into the industry, covers start-ups trying to digitalize what has been largely an economy based on piracy, and documents the shooting of a historic epic in the northern city of Jos, which is emerging after years of civil conflict and a brutal attack by Boko Haram. The Nigerian movie industry, like Nigeria itself, is an organized chaos, but amid electricity cuts, fuel scarcity, and countless other obstacles its producers are pursuing the very real possibility that Nigerian movies could become a global brand as recognizable as the Bollywood musical, the Hong Kong kung fu flick, or the Hollywood blockbuster.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction

128 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2017

About the author

Emily Witt is a writer in New York City. She has written for n+1, The New York Times, New York Magazine, GQ, the London Review of Books, and many other places. She has degrees from Brown, Columbia, and Cambridge, and was a Fulbright scholar in Mozambique. Her first book, Future Sex, about the intersection of sex and technology, was published in 2016 by Faber & Faber.

Reviews

[Colton Brydges · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short and sweet, but a useful overview of the history of Nollywood and some of the more recent trends in the industry. Nollywood is a cultural and economic giant with humble origins, and this short text gives a crash course and contrasts the New Nollywod with the more traditional films. Also includes some short summaries of representative films.

[Justin Decloux · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid, if skimpy at 100 pages, look at the Nigerian film industry.

[Chloe · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was just okay. Informative but nothing special