Nollywood comes of age
O As many as 93 countries have submitted films for the 2021 Academy Awards, the largest field ever. Genevieve Nnagi’s Lionheart (2018), a family business comedy, was Nigeria’s first-ever entry for Best International Feature Film at last year’s awards, but it was disqualified because most of its dialogue was in English, Nigeria’s official language, and only 10 minutes was in Igbo.
This year the Nigerian Oscars selection committee won’t be making the same mistake again. They have chosen as the nation’s entry Desmond Ovbiagele’s The
Milkmaid (below), which is set in the rural north-east, where the languages spoken are Hausa, Arabic and Fulfulde.
Inspired by the image of two Fulani milkmaids which adorns the Nigerian ten-naira note, it tells the story of two peasant sisters, Aisha and Zainab, who are abducted from their village and forced to wed the same Boko Haram militant, although the group is never named.
It has won five Africa Movie Academy Awards, including Best Film, and joins an already established genre of Boko Haram movies which includes the documentary short Daughters of Chibok (2019) and the thriller The Delivery Boy (2018). A fine performance as the militant husband by Gambo Usman Kona and the lush widescreen cinematography of Yinka Edwards, who was previously responsible for Lionheart, are notable strengths of The
Milkmaid. Its mere submission to the Oscars is hugely significant for Nigerian cinema.
This is only Ovbiagele’s second film. He spent ten years as an investment banker with Citigroup and Standard Chartered Bank before he wrote, produced and directed the crime drama Render to Caesar
(2014), about a crazed mobster kingpin, which won Best Screenplay at both the Nollywood Movies Awards and Best of Nollywood Awards.
Nigeria’s film censorship board forced Ovbiagele, who has again combined writing, producing and directing, to trim 24 minutes from his original 136-minute cut of The Milkmaid, which is the version that Academy members will see and which has already been shown in other African countries such as Zimbabwe and Cameroon. “Some of it didn’t make sense,” Ovbiagele, said in a recent interview. “We had to remove everything — costume, language, dialogue that was an authentic depiction of a particular religion [Islam], even though there is nothing in the film that states that the religion was directly responsible for violence.” (Boko Haram’s insurgency has killed around 37,000 and
CENSORSHIP HAS SUPPRESSED NIGERIAN FILMS THAT HAVE WON INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM