ABSTRACT
Nollywood, the video-film industry from Nigeria, emerged on the scene in the early 1990s, when film industries around the world were going through major transformations of economy, production, and ideology. Since then, a spate of newspaper and magazine articles, photo essays, and documentaries have come out on this youngest film industry in world cinema, which express mostly curiosity about this film phenomenon defined by low budgets, spontaneous and improvised acting, poor production quality, and unfathomable production rates. Nollywood may offer a different kind of production, distribution, and aesthetic model, which poses many questions for African cinema, but as the largest and most popular cinema it offers a central path through which to access contemporary African cinema and examine its mark on world cinema. The chapter also explains African cinema's posture toward the world, beginning with a claim to an independent, local aesthetic to a hybrid approach that desires accessibility.
