I No Longer Want To Licence My Movies In Nigeria – Imoh Umoren

Nollywood filmmaker, Imoh Umoren has come out to blast the National Film and Video Censors Board over its recent plan to enforce a law banning smoking in movies. Recall that Adedayo Thomas, NFVCB’s executive director revealed this while presenting a communique at the end of an entertainment industry stakeholders’ roundtable in Lagos on Saturday, December 11.

Reacting to this, Umoren simply accused the NFVCB of trying to regulate an industry that was started and sustained without the government’s help.

He added that decisions like this are part of the reasons why he no longer wants to license his movies here.

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.