VIDEOS IN MOTION - fasopo

owner or any of his friends. Once they finally started trusting me, one of the people in the shopapproached me with a smile on his face. He told me that he had played a role in one of the Nigerianproductions shot in Turin. He then took his phone, dialed a number and I suddenly found myselfspeaking with Rose Okoh and Vincent Omoigui, the founding members of the production companyI was desperately searching for. In the following months they let me discover Turin from theperspective of the Nigerian diaspora living there and introduced me to the complex world of“Nollywood abroad”, the parallel video phenomenon that emerged in many Western countries as aconsequence of the success of the Nigerian video industry.In many ways these two episodes assumed a determinant role in shaping the trajectories of myresearch. They highlighted the fact that Nollywood is not only a local or regional phenomenon. It isinstead a transnational entity, whose ramifications, in terms of both production and distribution, arecomplex, multiple and profoundly dynamic. I started to ask myself what was the impact thatinformal networks of circulation had on the Nigerian video industry’s economy, what role waspiracy playing in it, and what position were the diasporic production companies assuming withinthis landscape.These questions became more relevant once I finally went to Nigeria to start the African sectionof my fieldwork. When I arrived in Lagos at the beginning of 2010, I found that the video industrywas traversing a difficult moment. The section of it producing videos in English – on which I haddecided, as I will better discuss in the first chapter, to focus my research – was almost collapsing.The crisis of production had multiple reasons, and within them precisely the informality of videos’circulation and reproduction seemed to have become one of the most influential. Within thisframework the role of transnational networks of production and circulation appeared to haveassumed a particular role. The experiences I had had before going to Nigeria started to assume anew light in the economy of my work. I was finally ready to identify the topic of my thesis.When I came back from the first part of my fieldwork in Nigeria, I tried to systematize thenumerous interesting points that emerged from the research experience. I wanted to find a centralquestion that could organize the ideas I was formulating around the Nigerian video industry. As theepisodes I just discussed suggest, the transnational dimension of cultural production and circulationbecame a central area of interest in my work. I thus decided to focus my research on the analysis ofthe way the transnational mobility of cultural products affects and transforms a specific culturalindustry’s modes of operation. This is of course a general and extremely open question. To tackle it,within the context given by the specific segment of the Nigerian video industry I decided to focus8