LONDON, England (CNN) — Nigeria’s huge film industry, Nollywood, may have overtaken Hollywood as the world’s second largest producer of films, but piracy is threatening to cut off the industry in its prime.Nollywood insiders estimate that up to 50 percent of the industry’s profits are currently being lost to Nigeria’s endemic piracy and corruption problems.“Piracy has dealt a big blow to the industry,” Emmanuel Isikaku, a Nollywood producer of 13 years and president of the Film & Video Producers and Marketers Association of Nigeria told CNN.Isikaku, 42, claims he lost so much money on his 2007 movie “Plane Crash” through piracy that he failed to recover his costs, despite the film’s popularity with audiences.“I couldn’t make anything from it,” Isikaku told CNN. “Because of piracy I didn’t even break even.“A lot of people watched the film, but unfortunately they watched pirated copies,” he said.Nigeria’s huge, mostly unregulated film industry is based in Lagos, the sprawling, frenetic financial capital of west Africa’s largest country.your advert can be here for free !
Made with a spirit of grassroots entrepreneurship, Nollywood’s video-format B movies are vibrant and inventive, fusing traditional voodoo and magic with urban romance stories.They are films that speak about modern life from an African perspective, driven by a narrative that is strongly rooted in the African oral storytelling tradition. Nollywood films are wildly popular across the continent and with the African diaspora all over the world.Nollywood recently overtook Hollywood as the world’s second biggest producer of movies behind India’s Bollywood.In 2006 it produced 872 movies compared with 485 major feature films in the U.S. (although for a fraction of the cost), according to a global cinema survey conducted by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS).Hollywood has started tapping into Nollywood’s global popularity: Earlier this year, “Close Enemies,” the first crossover film, was produced in LA by Prince Ade Bamiro using major Nollywood stars. It was made for $300,000 — about 10 times the average Nollywood budget — and was screened in the Nigerian Pavilion at Cannes.But improvements in piracy technology are making the problem more acute, draining Nollywood’s coffers and confidence and stopping the industry from making the improvements in quality it needs to cross over into the global mainstream.Nigeria’s independent producers self-fund hundreds of movies each year. The average budget is around N3.5 million ($25,000). They make their money back by selling DVDs of their movies, which they burn themselves, on stalls in markets or in shops.While Nigerians are wild about watching films, Nigeria has virtually no formal cinemas with 99 percent of screenings using DVDs held in informal settings, according to UNESCO.Producers have only one distribution route compared with, for example, Hollywood where studios recoup production costs through cinematic exhibition — an arena currently safe from piracy — and make a profit from DVD sales and TV rights.Most pirated movies are a victim of their own success: Pirates take the fastest-selling DVDs to China to be mass-produced and bring them back to Africa to sell.According to Isikaku, piracy was eating into his profits back in 2005, when he estimates he lost N10,000,000 ($68,000) because of illegally copied DVDs. But, he says, the problem became “alarming” in 2007 when pirates started to use video compression technology.Video compression digital technology allows from five to 20 films (both Nollywood and Hollywood) to be squeezed onto one disk and then sold for around N590 ($4).When a legitimate Nollywood DVD is sold for the equivalent of $7 to $10, it’s hard for producers to compete.“This new development in piracy has the potential to kill the industry off completely,” Dr. Sylvester Ogbechie, President of the LA-based Nollywood Foundation told CNN.Although no official figures exist, Ogbechie estimates from his conversations with some of the industry’s top producers that up to 50 percent of profits are currently being lost to piracy.Isikaku claims the problem is so endemic in Nigerian culture that some cable TV channels will air Nollywood movies without the permission of the producer, or that if they do pay, they pay “peanuts.”“And the moment people are watching on TV, they are discouraged from buying DVDs at the market,” he said.All this has had a knock-on effect on the confidence of the industry.“You think twice before you invest in film productions now,” says Isikaku. “Investors are being discouraged.”This feeling is endemic, and producers are trying to bring down production costs: “The quality of our productions is going down every day,” he explained.This is a blow to an industry known for low production values and whose practitioners are mostly self-taught.Criticisms of the industry’s films include poor sound quality, inadequate lighting, ill thought-out camera angles and the repetitive nature of many of its storylines.Insiders know that improving the quality of their films is crucial if their young industry is to make the leap into the global mainstream.They say Nigerian government must tighten up border controls and seize pirated DVDs as they re-enter the country from China.“Some of these movies come in through our airports, our ports,” says Isikaku. “Much depends on the government agencies.”Hope may come from the direction of Nigeria’s National Film & Video Censors Board led by Director-General Emeka Mba, who is making moves to restructure and formalize the industry.“There has to be some process of formalizing the industry — giving the industry depth and that’s where the government can come in through regulation, through incentives and create that process of empowerment for the industry,” Mba told CNN.“Hundreds of thousands of Nigerians are in this industry, especially young men and women.”Despite the setbacks, Isikaku also remains hopeful for the industry. “Pirates have stopped us working hard because we don’t get what we are due but all hope is not last because we are passionate.“Nollywood can come together to take action to help this industry to survive,” he said.your advert can be here for free !
Producer Paul Julius is confident that the tens of thousands of dollars he has spent producing the soap opera “Tomorrow’s Tears” will be recouped, no matter the electricity shortages, lack of investors or grease-palmed government officials hampering his shooting schedule.Fighting to be heard over a steady stream of traffic and actors complaining about the lack of food, money and air conditioning, Mr. Julius explained the plot of his soap, which he hopes to sell to local TV stations. “I changed the subject from the normal stuff: blood, magic, stepmothers, etc.,” he said. “This is going to be about real-life issues.”Mr. Julius is an up-and-coming player in Nigeria’s film and television industry, known as Nollywood, which has grown from its infancy in the 1980s into the one of the world’s biggest movie industries, but is facing some real-life issues of its own.In 2006, nearly 900 movies, almost all straight-to-video, were shot in Nigeria, trailing only India and almost doubling Hollywood’s total for the same year, according to a Unesco report released this month. Currently around 40 movies are shot every month in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, not counting the dozens of television dramas that are also shot here. The industry generates an estimated $250 million a year, and is popular throughout Africa and immigrant enclaves in Europe and the U.S.But rampant piracy means substantial losses for producers and directors already operating on tight budgets. Understaffed and bribe-ready police means copyright enforcement is minimal. Inadequate roadways inhibit a small distribution network itching to grow. Constant electricity outages stall production schedules. These problems threaten to derail the industry.Nigeria’s messy and often corrupt oil industry drives much of what happens in this country. It is the biggest oil producer in Africa, and as much as 95% of the country’s export earnings come from oil. Nigeria has taken in roughly $400 billion in oil-generated revenue since 1970 but the standard of living for most Nigerians has actually decreased.Nonetheless, the country’s residents have an impressive appetite for movies. The most successful Nollywood movies are often melodramas like “Living in Bondage” and “Domitilla,” filled with adultery, bribery and elements of local mysticism.A comedy, however, may have given Nollywood its best chance at international exposure. “Usuofia in London,” about a Nigerian man who lands in the big city straight from his native village, may be the best-selling Nollywood movie to date, with an estimated 500,000 copies sold. Only a handful of Nigerian movies have made it to international film festivals, such as “The Rivals,” directed by Aquila Njamah, which was shown at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival in 2007.Most Nigerian movies are produced fast and cheap, shot in a few weeks for $15,000 to $25,000, then roughly edited and handed off to marketers and eventually street-side vendors, or video clubs, as they are known locally. Financiers, usually friends or family members of the producer or director, want to see their investments recouped and care little for artistic exploration or high-quality technical effects.Directors are under pressure to keep each movie on schedule and under budget. Profits, when made, are small. Producers estimate that as much as 70% of their yearly revenue is lost to piracy. “I would say the biggest challenge facing the industry at the moment is lack of structure, and a high level of informality,” said Emeka Mba, the chairman of the National Film and Video Censors Board, the Nigerian movie industry’s main regulatory body.There is no formal distribution network for Nollywood producers. A finished movie in Lagos is burned onto around 15,000 DVDs with no copy protection and released into the market. If it’s a hit, demand swells. Vendors need more copies. But the producers often can’t keep up. So the movie is copied by pirates and thrown back into the market. The producer can only hope he made back his investment in time.“We’ve been crying to the government. If these things are not checked now, Nollywood will go into extinction,” said Cosmas Ndulue, 42, a producer and owner of one of only two indigenous DVD manufacturing companies in Nigeria.Industry officials and government agencies have started paying closer attention to piracy, but so far there hasn’t been much of an effect. A recent police raid on a well-known DVD-copying operation resulted in a brief confrontation between police and piracy-ring leaders. The pirates stood their ground and burned a police truck, then went back to work making knock-off Nollywood copies. The only repercussion for the offenders? A bill for the damage to the police vehicle.As piracy takes a larger and larger chunk of the profits, finding enough money to shoot a movie is becoming even more of a challenge. Chico Ejiro, a producer and director, has been struggling to find financing for his movies. A few years ago, during the shooting of his movie “Sisters on the Run,” he sold his car to keep the production afloat. This year he convinced a local bank to sponsor “100 Days in the Jungle,” a film about abduction and village lore, but it was a flop and Mr. Ejiro says the bank quickly soured on Nollywood.Mr. Julius, despite his production headaches, is optimistic about the future of Nollywood, as are most industry players. While watching two of his actors struggle to finish a scene on a busy Lagos street, Mr. Julius was looking forward to a complicated shoot that would involve a substantial police convoy, hundreds of extras, and foreign actors.“I need someone to play the British prime minister in the big scene we’re shooting this weekend,” Mr. Julius said, eyeing a reporter up and down. “Am I looking at him?”
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