VIDEOS IN MOTION - fasopo

arena in which in most of the cases stories of migration have to be dramatic and films about themhave to be political.While IGB’s films will hardly be screened in Italian festivals and televisions because of theirAfrocentric contents and their entertainment-oriented style, GVK’s films (and especially its lastproject, Blinded Devil) are likely to be able to receive funding and distribution in Italy thanks totheir specific approach to migration and their strategic alignment with some aspects of migrantcinema aesthetics. IGB's films put Italy at the periphery of their universe and their Afrocentricnarrative challenges Eurocentric discourses, but they do so mainly because they have to please thealready established tastes of Nollywood popular audiences, thus confirming the existing exoticrepresentation that characterizes Nollywood's imagery of the elsewhere. GVK's films, on the otherhand, problematize the experience of migration and challenge Italian policies around this issue, butthis is partly the result of a strategy not eminently political but commercial, devised to access Italianaudiences and public institutions’ funding.Genres and audiences of diasporic Nigerian productionsBy comparing the analysis of the Nigerian production companies in Italy with the work of theother companies active in Europe it is possible to produce a tentative categorization of the aestheticand narrative transformations of Nigerian video’s genres in the diaspora. Among the differentsolutions that characterize each of the films produced by diasporic companies, it is possible toidentify at least three main genres, which are connected to specific production strategies and areoriented toward different shares of the audience. Most of the production companies experimentedwith more than one genre during their activity, in order to find the solution that could better positiontheir products on the film market, in Europe and in Nigeria. As I mentioned in the previous chapter,the boundaries between film genres are flexible, and the categories that I propose below work moreas a model than as a rigid taxonomy. A film’s affiliation to a specific genre is in fact hard to define,and a film can present in itself elements that belong to different genres at the same time. Howeverthe categorization that I suggest below might be useful to draw some general conclusions.The first genre that I have identified might be called the “Nigerian melodrama abroad”. Thefilms that belong to this category include most of those produced by IGB in Italy (Kiki Marriage,Abroad Wahala, The Only Way After Home but It’s Risky) and some of those produced by Double‘A’ Entertainment in Holland (Dapo Junior, From Holland with Love) and by Ehizoya GoldenEntertainment in Germany (Love in Berlin). As I have underlined while describing the work of IGB,188