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Lagos (AFP)
The Nigerian film industry, nicknamed Nollywood, has long entertained viewers with stories of romance and wealth, and foreign investors are increasingly looking for some of the action.
The US giant Netflix, the French Cbad + and the Chinese China StarTimes are among those who evolve in the second most prolific film industry in the world, which produces more than 2,500 films each year and is dominated only by the Bollywood India.
At an event held in Nigeria's economic capital, Lagos, this week, potential French investors mingled with local directors and politicians as they heard about the opportunities offered.
"Box office revenue has increased by 36% between 2017 and 2018, from $ 17.3 to $ 23.6 million," said Chijioke Uwaegbute, an industry expert at PwC Nigeria.
"Nowhere in the world will you see this kind of opportunity and growth."
Nollywood films are traditionally low-budget productions, often shot in a few days at a cost of several thousand dollars and wasted by poor quality of sound and images.
Endemic piracy and the widespread circulation of unlicensed copies have nibbled profits and deterred investors from increasing funding.
But Nigerian high-quality films have had much more impact in recent years at the box office in a country with a potential market of nearly 200 million people.
The wedding party and its sequel, Wedding Party 2, launched by director Kemi Adetiba in 2016 and 2017, generated more than $ 2 million, beating for the first time the US blockbuster.
Following this success, Niyi Akinmolayan's chief comedy Chief Daddy reported some $ 600,000 last year.
The numbers are minimal compared to the huge amounts reported by Hollywood successes, and the Oscars are a distant dream, but more and more Nigerians in the middle and upper clbad who can afford the tickets seem ready to pay to go see local productions.
And it is these films with higher production value that attract foreign investors.
– & # 39; Real Appetite & # 39; –
Cbad Olympia, a subsidiary of French media giant Vivendi, operates movie theaters and entertainment venues across the continent and includes at least one Nollywood film in its programming each week.
Next year, the group will open two cinemas in Nigeria, a country with a single screen per million inhabitants, where power shortages and the high cost of land have complicated such businesses.
"It's very important for us to be close to Nollywood," Simon Minkowski, director of channel development at Olympia, told AFP.
"But beyond mere distribution, there is a real appetite for producing content created by Africans in Africa."
Laurent Sicouri, head of acquisitions at Cbad +, went to Lagos to "evaluate the production" of Nigerian cinema.
The channel has already increased its interest in the country's films and is offering Nollywood TV to its French-speaking African subscribers.
While Europe is arousing interest, the attention of Nigerian filmmakers and producers focuses primarily on attracting Netflix.
The online entertainment service provider has already acquired the rights to a series of Nollywood productions and in January released Netflix's first Nigerian film, Lionheart, by director-director Genevieve Nnaji.
Industry players hope that the influx of foreign interest will help push their production to a higher level.
However, Serge Noukoue, founder of the Paris-based Nollywood Week film festival, warned that the sector needed to be well positioned to make the most of it.
"Now that Nollywood is attracting investors, Nigerians need to learn to better protect their interests, so as to avoid the pure exploitation of their content," he said.
"At the moment, they are selling to Netflix and it's the end of the story."
? AFP 2019
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