Nollywood Actors Must Work With Integrity – Wumi Toriola

Nollywood actress Wumi Toriola has urged practitioners to embrace higher standards and stronger structures. She recently had her say at her event, organized to bring some of the movie industry’s leading figures together at a thought-provoking colloquium and end-of-year soirée held at the Radisson Blu Hotel, Ikeja.

According to her, if Nollywood must attract serious global and local investment, actors and filmmakers must recognise the weight of their influence.

Wumi added that the reality is that children trust entertainers more than they trust their own parents nowadays.

Her words, “Character is different from integrity. People may judge me by the roles I play, but no one can say I collected money and didn’t deliver. Integrity must guide everything we do.”

WOW.

Nollywood is a sobriquet that originally referred to the Nigerian film industry. The origin of the term dates back to the early 2000s, traced to an article in The New York Times. Due to the history of evolving meanings and contexts, there is no clear or agreed-upon definition for the term, which has made it a subject to several controversies.

The origin of the term “Nollywood” remains unclear; Jonathan Haynes traced the earliest usage of the word to a 2002 article by Matt Steinglass in the New York Times, where it was used to describe Nigerian cinema.

Charles Igwe noted that Norimitsu Onishi also used the name in a September 2002 article he wrote for the New York Times. The term continues to be used in the media to refer to the Nigerian film industry, with its definition later assumed to be a portmanteau of the words “Nigeria” and “Hollywood”, the American major film hub.

Film-making in Nigeria is divided largely along regional, and marginally ethnic and religious lines. Thus, there are distinct film industries – each seeking to portray the concern of the particular section and ethnicity it represents. However, there is the English-language film industry which is a melting pot for filmmaking and filmmakers from most of the regional industries.