Welcome To Nollywood!

Hollywood? Old news. Bollywood? Been there, done that. The newest frontier in film is emerging in the unlikeliest of places: Nigeria. “Buoyed by a voracious appetite among Nigerians (population: 128 million) for their own stories, and bolstered by the proliferation of video equipment — allowing for less expensive production costs — this developing nation’s burgeoning film business now produces a whopping 1,000 features a year.” The Nigerian scene (known, of course, as Nollywood) has risen astonishingly quickly from its beginnings in the 1970s, and it is beginning to produce huge stars whose profiles will soon be noticeable even from the cloistered U.S.