North Carolina hosts African film awards

It turns out that the region is home to a group of dedicated critics of African films – immigrants who came to the region for professional reasons but found common ground in their love of movies and a desire to promote the continent’s nascent industry. They formed Nollywood Film Critics USA about four years ago, […]

It turns out that the region is home to a group of dedicated critics of African films – immigrants who came to the region for professional reasons but found common ground in their love of movies and a desire to promote the continent’s nascent industry.

They formed Nollywood Film Critics USA about four years ago, set up a website to post their reviews for African audiences and are culminating their efforts with North America’s first Nollywood & African Film Critic’s Awards at the Sheraton Imperial Hotel & Convention Center in Durham.

The African film industry, which got its start in Nigeria – hence “Nollywood” – produces more than 800 movies a year throughout the continent, although more than 90 percent are still made in Nigeria and Ghana.

Nollywood, however, has gone global, referring now to movies produced by Africans who live on the continent and abroad.

“It’s African-wide,” says Victor Olatoye, founder of the critics association. Trained as a veterinarian, he moved to the United States from Nigeria in 1987 to work as a microbiologist. Olatoye said he knew early on after founding Nollywood Film Critics USA that the group would eventually host an event in North Carolina to honour the year’s best cinematic achievements in Africa. There are already two similar events – the African Movie Academy Awards in Nigeria and the Zafaa Awards in London, England, otherwise known as “Nollywood, UK.”

Marc Lee, one of the coordinators of the Black Diaspora Film Festival at the Hayti Heritage Center in Durham, says the event is important for the state.

“This is a feather in the state’s cap,” Lee said. The event has been well-publicized in the Ghanaian and Nigerian press, but few people – save for Africans living in America – have heard about it.

Darrell Stover, program director for the North Carolina Humanities Council and a past selection committee member of the Full Frame Documentary Festival in Durham, said the event has potential to contribute to cross-cultural understanding. He said he hopes film lovers will support the awards gala so that it can continue.

“Recognition means there is a greater potential for more funding and support,” Stover said. “No recognition means we lose the chance to engage these films and network, and that certainly would be a loss.”

When Olatoye, who lives in Raleigh, founded the critic’s group, he wanted to create standards for the continent’s film industry with an eye toward improving storylines, sound and picture quality, production, screenwriting, directing and performances.

Since the Nollywood Film Critics USA’s inception, Olatoye and his colleagues, Ghana native Richard Boateng of Durham and Troy McNish of Apex, N.C., have sat in a home theatre at Olatoye’s house and reviewed more than 500 films from all over Africa, Europe and North America.

Before Olatoye founded the group, he said typical critiques of African movies involved journalists looking at trailers, then allowing the film’s producers to fill in the blanks before sitting down to write a review.

“We are trying to change how people see African films,” said Olatoye, who added that the group has also developed a star rating system it recently patented – from half-star to five stars – that will appear on the outside of the films’ covers next year. “We wanted to create some kind of quality control.”

Nollywood is a relatively new industry that began in the early 1990s.

Today, Nollywood is the third largest film industry in the world, behind Hollywood and India’s Bollywood. Olatoye says the Nollywood industry earns close to $2 billion annually. Most movies are produced for television on shoestring budgets and are primarily in English because they are targeted for English-speaking audiences.

The average production cost for a Nollywood film is about $20,000.

Olatoye said there are a number of elements in African filmmaking that sets it apart from its counterparts in Hollywood, but most importantly, “the African cinema tells the African story through the Africans’ eyes.”

Miami Herald