Paris gets taste of Nigeria's Nollywood

Paris gets a taste of Nigeria’s film industry on Wednesday with the start of the NollywoodWeek festival, with movies exploring love, family and duty, shorts and documentaries. Now in its 13th edition, the NOW festival this week showcases films not only from Nigeria’s Nollywood but also Ghanaian, Kenyan and Senegalese productions and filmmakers from the African diaspora.

“With my partners, we came to the realisation that a city like Paris just could not ignore the cultural phenomenon that Nollywood had become,” co-founder Serge Noukoue told AFP about the festival, which began in 2013. “We just thought it was an opportunity to change the narrative around African film. ” Last year, for the first time a Nollywood movie, “My Father’s Shadow” scored an official slot at Cannes, marking another step for an industry long seen as producing a stream of low-budget dramas.

The rise of streaming services and the growing popularity of African music such as Afrobeats and Amapiano has helped expose film culture to new audiences — as well as increasing quality, access and funding. But producers still struggle to reach outside Africa beyond the diaspora despite making many more films every year than Hollywood. India’s Bollywood is the largest in terms of numbers produced.

The five-day NOW festival, based in the Paris classic arthouse L’Arlequin, showcases films such as “East West Love” a love story between Nigeria and Kenya, and “Evi Superstar”, about a rising Nigerian singer forced to rebuild her career. “Mothers of Chibok” looks at the impact of the kidnapping of the Chibok girls by jihadists in Nigeria in 2014, while “Batwing Unmasked: An African Superhero” examines the first African superhero in DC Comics universe.