VIDEOS IN MOTION - fasopo

Nollywood abroad: Defining the history and the specificities of Nigerian video filmmaking inEurope 128The first Nigerian production company to appear in Europe is the Double ‘A’ Entertainment,created by Tony Dele Akinyemi and Leonard Ajayi-Odekhiran in Eindhoven, Netherlands, around1998. As reported by Sophie Samyn (2010), the two Nigerians met soon after arriving in Holland atthe beginning of the 1990s. They were both partly involved in the entertainment sector beforeleaving Nigeria (Akinyemi used to work for one of the local televisions and Ajayi-Odekhiran was adancer and a singer) but at the time they left the country the video industry was not yet born. Asreported in the interview that Samyn conducted with them (Akinyemi and Ajayi-Odekhiran 2010),they discovered Nollywood while in Europe and they became enthusiastic fans. Drawing inspirationfrom the Nigerian video films they have watched, they decided to set up their own productioncompany and in 1998 they produced their first video, Under Pressure. Shot with derisory means,the video reinterprets the biographical experiences of the two producers and narrates the story of ayoung Nigerian who moves to Holland and struggles to settle down and build a new life for himself.I will better discuss the content of this and of the other videos produced in Europe in the nextsections of this chapter. Here it is important to underline that the video managed to have a wideinformal circulation amongst diasporic audiences. This kind of circulation did not pay back whathad been invested, but gave the two producers the motivation to continue their venture and toproduce, in the years to come, three more videos: Dapo Junior (2000), Holland Heat (2002) andFrom Amsterdam With Love (2003).In the early 2000s diasporic Nigerian video production exploded and new production companiesemerged in numerous other European countries. In the United Kingdom, Obi Emelonye, a youngNigerian living in London since the early 1990s, created a production company, Basic Input, andreleased his first video, Good Friends (2000). After spending a short period in Nigeria, he returnedto the UK, created a new production company, The Nollywood Factory, and went on to produceseveral films, such as Echoes of War (2003), The London Successor (2006), Lucky Joe (2006) andThe Mirror Boy (2010), some of which managed to be released in mainstream cinemas all over theUnited Kingdom.128 For the contents of this section of the chapter I warmly thank the kind collaboration of Sophie Samyn, who madeavailable to me the video films of the Nigerian production companies active in Holland, Germany and Belgium, and thetranscription of the interviews she conducted during her MA dissertation research in these countries.176