12 Ambassadors, 12 fresh faces for Nollywood

According to scholars of Nigerian cinema, modern (English-language) film-making in Nigeria began in 1992 with Kenneth Nnebue’s hugely successful Living in Bondage, which was shot in the eastern Nigerian city of Onitsha in Anambra State. In a way, the scholars point out, it is this history that accounts for the character of Nigeria’s contemporary film […]

According to scholars of Nigerian cinema, modern (English-language) film-making in Nigeria began in 1992 with Kenneth Nnebue’s hugely successful Living in Bondage, which was shot in the eastern Nigerian city of Onitsha in Anambra State. In a way, the scholars point out, it is this history that accounts for the character of Nigeria’s contemporary film industry. “Through the business instincts and ethnic links of the Igbos and their dominance of distribution in major cities across Nigeria,” Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia said in its entry on Nigerian cinema, “home videos began to reach people across the country.”

Now, with the almost across-the-board national acceptance of Nollywood home videos came the yearning for more representativeness in the industry’s cast of actors to mirror the cultural and ethnic landscape of the nation. This yearning, theatre critics say, is an acknowledgement of the increasing acceptance and importance of Nollywood both as a source of entertainment and as an avenue for cultural education across the nation. Although the Yoruba and Hausa film industries are vibrant in their own right, film critics say they cater to narrow ethnic audiences and have therefore never been expected to live up to the demand of ethnic and cultural representativeness in their dramatis personae.

While the need to reflect Nigeria’s rich ethnic and cultural diversity in the cast of characters of Nigeria’s (English-language) film industry is recognized and acknowledged even by the old stagers of Nollywood, there has been little or no incentive to actualize this desire.

For starters, theatre experts posit, most Nollywood films are financed wholly or in part by struggling entrepreneurs who cannot afford the cost of a nationwide talent hunt that is required to diversify the industry’s current crop of actors. The financially safest way for them, according to experts, is to utilize already known and easily accessible actors who, for historical reasons, tend to come from one part of the country for the most part.

This state of affairs has not been helped by the minimal or non-existent government and private sector investment in the Nigerian movie industry. In countries like India, Germany, Britain, and even in such US states as New York, Connecticut, Oklahoma and New Mexico, the national and local film industries are often supported by government grants, tax schemes, debt finance, and equity finance. In Nigeria, it is only now that a ray of hope is appearing at the end of the tunnel.

The 12 Ambassadors, which was designed to search for talents across the length and breadth of the nation. As the official web site of The 12 Ambassadors project aptly noted, “The increasing success stories of the Nigerian Film Industry can not be qualified and ignored because the recent call by well-meaning Nigerians that it should be used as a tool for further unification of the country and also for the laundering of the country’s image.”

Watchers of the Nigerian film industry say The 12 Ambassadors show, which screened an unprecedented 50,000 young, talented, energetic, and enthusiastic Nigerian youths all over the country, is the single largest nationwide talent hunt in Nollywood’s history. Unity Bank and Royal Pictures Limited, the brains behind the massive talent search, say the project is a deliberate effort to discover and cement the ties that bind us as a nation through the theater. “The project is actually designed to search and bring out actors that will stand the test of time and make the country proud,” says Unity Bank’s web site, which houses The 12 Ambassadors project.

Officials at Unity Bank’s corporate affairs unit point out that the bank’s sponsorship of this nationwide talent hunt for Nollywood is not accidental. It is rooted, they say, in the cosmopolitan ideals that informed the founding of the bank.

A nationally integrated movie industry, experts say, serves the nation well, given that Nigeria has been grappling with the problem of national unity and cohesion almost since her founding in 1960. Nollywood, they add, is uniquely suited, in more ways than any national institution, to bring Nigerians together for the collective national good. Interestingly, the winners of The 12 Ambassadors show come from all the six geo-political zones in the country.

When Paul Obazele, president of the Association of Movie Producers (AMP) and managing director of Royal Pictures Limited told the press a while back that the 12 young talents out of the over 50,000 youths that participated in the audition exercises for The 12 Ambassadors project across the country would “in a matter of weeks be given a place of pride in the history of movie making in Nigeria” few believed him.

 But his prognosis has come to pass probably sooner than he himself had anticipated. The theater careers of the 12 young men and women can only soar even higher especially after being officially honored and rewarded by Unity Bank in the presence of Nigeria’s Information and Communications Minister and Nollwood’s crème de la crème.