Immigrants are shooting stories that contribute to the breathtakingly prolific West African film industry.

By Matt Blanchard

For The Inquirer
While Philadelphia celebrates most any piece of Hollywood glamour it can get, few have noticed another globally important movie industry making inroads here.

It's not Hollywood, nor is it India's Bollywood, but rather Nollywood - the freewheeling and wildly prolific West African cinema nicknamed for its base in Nigeria.

With annual sales estimated at more than $200 million, Nollywood is the world's third-largest film industry, and may be home to some of its fastest filmmakers. According to the Nigerian Film and Video Censors Board, Nollywood churned out 1,687 films in 2005 alone - many shot on a shoestring budget, edited and released in just 10 days.

The movies, many of them soap operas with plots revolving around religion and family, love and betrayal, are available in the United States in African-owned video stores, hair-braiding salons and eateries, and such sites as nollywoodmoviesonline.com.

Now Philadelphia's African immigrants aren't just importing Nollywood hits, they're making them, with two locally shot films released this summer and two more on the way.

Once Upon a Lie, the second film by a mixed African and American team, premieres July 18 at Southwest Philadelphia's ACANA community center. It's a suspenseful blend of Nollywood's two major preoccupations, melodrama and the supernatural, transported to Southwest Philly's Woodland Avenue, the heart of the city's African community.

On the set last month, actor Mustapha Saccoh, a.k.a. "Daddy Muss," explained his part in the complex plot. He plays a sharply dressed, diabolical seducer named P-Jack who steals the wife of an honest African immigrant with the help of a magic charm concealed in a potted palm. The poor husband sends home to Africa for a second wife, but struggles with his own extramarital temptations, while the local pastor, tormented by visions, tries to counter P-Jack's malign influence.

Saccoh, a 44-year-old reggae musician from Sierra Leone who sings about love and positive values, says he's a little nervous about playing a libidinous villain like P-Jack. But the theme of adultery resonates down at 65th and Woodland.

"There are guys just like him who come here and don't want to work," says Saccoh, who lives in Southwest Philadelphia. "They dress real nice and behave like Casanovas so the women will take care of them."

The film's supernatural aspects - the clairvoyant priest, the magic love charm - reflect the mix of Christian and traditional myth in West African film (for a more outlandish example, check YouTube for a trailer for The Stolen Bible).

"The film has aspects of social realism," explains the American director Michael Wellenreiter of Severine Pictures, "but at the same time, there's an apocalyptic conflagration to end the film."

Wellenreiter and cinematographer Adam Carrigan are known for their music videos for two of Philly's biggest indie bands, Man Man and The Teeth. For them, a major appeal of West African cinema is simply that it's nothing like American independent film.

"It's a way of escaping all the indie cliches," Carrigan says. "You know, the personality quirks, and the family issues, and the whole kitsch aesthetic. . . . This is the opposite of all that."

The team behind a second Philly Nollywood film, Imported Bride, operates from the back room of an African video store at 66th and Woodland. Unable to afford a professional cameraman, producer Sekou Kamara, a native Liberian, says his team bought two $4,000 Panasonic digital cameras, mastered Adobe editing software, and watched countless YouTube clips to learn filmmaking.

"YouTube is our university," Kamara joked. He spent years in refugee camps in Ghana before arriving here in 2000.

Imported Bride, too, tracks immigrant family anxieties, following an older man who sends to Africa for a wife, only to see her run up huge cell phone bills and take up with a flashy younger man.

"When the woman comes here, she wants to realize her own dreams," says the movie's male lead, Mamulu Henry. "African men have to realize this is the land of opportunity, not only for men, but for everybody."

Getting his traditional-minded actors to play the romantic scenes took a lot of coaxing, Kamara says, but having released the film in mid-June, he's already editing Imported Bride 2. As fans know, every Nollywood film has a sequel. Continued    Source: nigeriafilms.com - Nigeria Films