West Africa has become the birthplace of one of the world’s largest film industry, in terms of production. The Nigerian film industry, nicknamed “Nollywood,” produces hundreds of films annually. And, this puts Nollywood high in the rankings for production.
In fact, according to a 2009 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report, the Nigerian film industry has overtaken Hollywood and closed the gap on India, the global leader in the number of movies produced each year.
According to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) survey, Bollywood – as the Mumbai-based film industry is known – produced 1,091 feature-length films in 2006. In comparison, Nigeria’s moviemakers came out with close to 900 productions – all in video format – while the United States produced 485 major films.
With the production of dozens of movie titles per week, Nollywood is commanding global attention by its size and work rate and is arguably one of Nigeria’s positive cultural contributions to the international community.
Find out more about Nollywood and the growth of the entertainment industry by reading this month’s issue of Global Communicator, a Global Language Solutions ePublication.
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