VIDEOS IN MOTION - fasopo

disappointed: either there was no trace of Nollywood films in the program or, if Nollywood wasthere, it was, as I underlined earlier, ghettoized in some marginal thematic retrospective. In thefollowing years, each time larger Nigerian delegations attended international festivals such as theBerlinale (cf. Ayorinde 2004a; 2005; Iwenjora 2005) and the Cannes Film Festival (cf. Ayorinde2004b; Husseini 2006; Oladunjoye 2005), with the explicit aim of understanding what the Nigerianindustry was missing in order to have access to the global audience. This happened at a time inwhich, as I emphasized in the third chapter, the internal film market was imploding because of theexcess of informality of the video economy, and an increasing number of producers were looking atthe international market as the only viable economic solution to the production crisis. As LancelotImasuen well summarizes in an interview he gave just after attending an international film festivalin Holland, the feeling Nigerian filmmakers got from their international exposure has been hard todigest.It would take me days – he said to the journalist that was interviewing him – to tell youwhat we learned technically and production wise. I just went into our hotel room andstarted weeping that we have been joking. It’s like a dancer that thinks he is the best,who gets out and sees far better dancers everywhere (Iwenjora 2003a)The acquired awareness of the industry’s main weaknesses, however, had the effect of giving theindustry a boost in accelerating the acquisition of new technologies, new technical skills, and betternarrative and aesthetic values. The objective of this effort is, as Femi Odugbemi clearlyemphasized, to take Nigerian cinema out of the ghetto in which the international discourse haspositioned it:I believe that film language is a global language, you can make a silent film and beunderstood in Hong Kong if the language that is used is the right one… I think weshould not make Nigerian films, but films in Nigeria! We have to make films that travelacross borders, and to do that you have to make films in a language that people canrelate with […] we should not insist on Nollywood being judged on its own, it wouldmean to be judged on a lower standard of quality and ability and I do not accept that. Ithink that every Nigerian director has the potential to do a film that has internationalstandards, that can win in international festivals and so on… (Odugbemi 2010).134