Why Nollywood Needs to Have a Learning Culture for Sustainability, Says Odugbemi

By Vanessa Obioha

Despite the growing number of training opportunities available in the Nigerian film industry today, there seems to be an incurious approach to them. This complacent response was the premise of the keynote address by prolific filmmaker and CEO of Zuri24 Media, Femi Odugbemi at the inaugural graduation ceremony of KAP Film and Television Academy recently.

Mincing no words, Odugbemi argued that it is one thing to institutionally create knowledge platforms, training and schools, it is quite a different proposition for each professional to embrace the opportunities to learn. Therefore, “for institutional training to be effective and progressive, the beneficiaries must esteem the learning experience as critical not just to their economic well-being but to personal growth as artists and storytellers,” he said.

Odugbemi bemoaned the esteem for learning which he said is missing in the industry today and is critical to the sustainability of the industry. Making a case on why the film industry needs to imbibe a learning culture, he posited that “Whatever ‘expertise’ we claim from yesterday is evolving even as we take grasp of it.”

He continued: “If there are any fundamental realities that undergird any industry’s success globally today, it is that it must represent its unique cultural stories in ideation and expression, it must be driven by technology in its execution and distribution, and it must engage strong creative collaborations with others and the quality control mechanism of global best practices in the filmmaking process are non-negotiable. The demand of these is that the sustainability of an industry like Nollywood which has grown organically and mostly through practice will depend on its openness to continuously learning, unlearning and relearning.”

This learning, he argued, starts from  “understanding the fundamentals of the craft, the fundamentals of the technology driving it, the fundamentals of storytelling as both an art and a science and the fundamentals of the matrix and strategies that inform distribution on the different emerging channels and platforms worldwide. Beyond the fundamentals, learning is also how we esteem new ideas and fresh thinking.

“The underground joke in many international film festivals is that Nigerians come to film festivals for shopping and long bouts of drinking at bars and hardly watch any films. We spend time constantly talking about looking for funding but we don’t network or meet other filmmakers from other film cultures to learn. Even the film festivals that are held in Nigeria and the learning opportunities that they offer are rarely attended by the majority of those who need them the most. It is often the same usual suspects that gather at these festivals because most of our filmmakers imagine themselves as self-made experts and superstars who already know all there is to know about filmmaking.

“We hear them say things like ‘filmmaking is not about speaking big big grammar,’ or ‘I just want to shoot my film,’ as if the creative craft is some exercise in sewing or bricklaying. We really like award shows on the other hand because it offers the public adulation that soothes our competitive instincts. We are all for the show but we ignore the ‘business’ in show business.

“The problem with that is that filmmaking and storytelling is actually a serious business of imagination and intellect because it is about ideas, interpretation and representation. Maybe that also explains why we shy away from the treasure trove of Nigerian literature books waiting to be made into films. We are too anti-intellectual to engage the themes and stories of our own literary heritage. So we keep making stories limited to our personal contemporary experiences and trapped by the limitations of our exposure. We need to up our game. We need the humility to learn so we can grow.”

A learning culture in his terms includes “welcoming intellectualism, seeking to interrogate assumptions in the hope of entrenching the good and moving on from what does not serve the best interests of our development. It is about openness to alternative viewpoints and contrary perceptions. It is about avoiding negativity whenever accountability is demanded”

Having that learning culture he concluded will help expand the boundaries of our storytelling beyond entertainment to also edutainment and elevate the consciousness of our audiences through our stories and the characters we create.