This book is the first definitive publication on Tunde Kelani, and represents a mine of divergent scholarly approaches to understanding his authorial power. A collection of articles on the cinematic oeuvre of one of the important and finest filmmakers in Africa, it addresses diverse areas that are crucial to Kelani’s filmic corpus and African cinema. Contributors articulate Kelani’s visual crafts in detail, while providing explications on significant markers. The book offers an understanding of how Kelani’s works represent the African worldview, science, demonstrative law, politics, gender, popular culture, canonized culture and history.

The English-language branch of the Nigerian film industry, Nollywood, has become the third largest in the world. Nollywood films saturate Nigeria and have spread across the African continent, achieving an astonishing extent and depth of cultural influence. They are the most important modern cultural form to come out of Africa. In this book, Jonathan Haynes aims to map out the cultural terrain of Nollywood films much more comprehensively and ambitiously than has been to date. He in effect establishes a canon for Nollywood films. The book is organized around the historical development of Nollywood film culture, which is explored with close attention to the recent history of Nigeria. Throughout the book, genre (defined with reference to common usage in Nigerian film markets) is the principal framework. Thus after establishing a sense of the material and social circumstances out of which Nollywood was born and exploring a few landmark films, Haynes analyzes the durable set of themes and plot types that dominate the industry and reveal deeply embedded tensions in contemporary Nigerian life. These genres include family films and romances, village films, cultural epics, political films, films made in or about the Nigerian diaspora, and campus films. Haynes concludes by offering some remarks on the future of Nollywood, exploring the buzz around a New Nollywood of films with higher budgets fit for international film festivals and widespread screening in cinemas in Nigeria and abroad."

"The story of the cinema in Nigeria started in colonial times and has remained a catalogue of tense struggles against economic and bureaucratic forces originating from that period. It has been a long battle for survival through improvisation and entrepreneurship which have established the most unique funding pattern for film making on the African continent. The Cinema in Nigeria provides a situation account with details of the efforts by individuals who have propped up the Nigerian film industry and supported it with flights into folklore and mythology and occasional sorties into contemporary themes"--

This book traces the developments in African films that were made from the 1990s to the present within the evolving frame of what came to be called ‘World Cinema’ and, eventually, ‘Global Cinema.’ Kenneth W. Harrow explores how, from the time video and then digital technologies were introduced in the 1990s, and then again, when streaming platforms assumed major roles in producing and distributing film between the 2010s and 2020s, African cinema underwent enormous changes. He highlights how the introduction of the continent’s first successful commercial cinema, Nollywood, shifted the focus from engagé films, with social or political messages, to entertainment movies, but also auteur cinema. Harrow explores how this transformation liberated African filmmakers and resulted in an incredible, enduring flow of creative, inventive, and thoughtful filmmaking. This book presents a number of those critical films that mark that trajectory, projecting a new sense of African film spaces and temporalities, while also highlighting how African films continue to find independent pathways. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of African cinema and world cinema, as well as researchers specifically examining African cinemas and their relationship to globalization.

With over 1,200 video films produced each year, Nigeria has become one of the most prolific producers of film fiction in the world. The majority of the films are of poor quality, made on very low budgets and in a very short time, but their production has a big impact on people in Nigeria and the industry's influence is extending across the continent. This book examines how the experiences and lives of Nigerians are narrated through the storyboards of the video producers, who copy with confidence and energy the recipes and formulas of popular films. As a home-grown industry that emerged spontaneously and without outside support, its vitality is a counter to 'Afro-pessimism' and demonstrates the possibility of reviving the African film industry and developing a cinema-going public to support it. PIERRE BARROT works in the Dept for Cultural Co-operation and Action at the French Embassy in Algiers, and was formerly the Regional Audio-Visual Attach at the French Embassy in Lagos. Contributors include TUNDE KELANI, OLIVIER BARLET, TUNDE OLADUNJOYE, FREDERIC NOY, DON PEDRO OBASEKI, IBBO DADDY ABDOULAYE, FRANCK BAKU FUITA, GODEFROID BWITI LUMISA & OGOVA ONDEGO Revised & updated from an earlier French edition published by Harmattan; Published in association with the French Embassy of Abuja; North America: Indiana University Press; Nigeria: HEBN

Nigerian video films--dramatic features shot on video and sold as cassettes--are being produced at the rate of nearly one a day, making them the major contemporary art form in Nigeria. The history of African film offers no precedent for such a huge, popularly based industry. The contributors to this volume, who include film and television directors, an anthropologist, and scholars of film studies and literature, take a variety of approaches to this flourishing popular art. Topics include aesthetic forms and distribution; the configurations of various ethnic audiences; the new media environment dominated by cassette technology; the video's materialism in a period of economic collapse; transformation of the traditional Yoruba traveling theater; individualism and the moral crisis in Igbo society; Hausa cultural values; the negotiation of gender roles, and the genre of Christian videos.