NOLLYWOOD: How Can A So Called Booming Film Industry Be Full of Hungry Actors and Directors?

NOLLYWOOD: How Can A So Called Booming Film Industry Be Full of Hungry Actors and Directors?

Nollywood makes news headlines as a booming film industry, the second largest in the world after the Bollywood of India in the production of movies estimated to be worth over US$250 million annually which is less than the total budget of Avatar ($280 million), Tangled ($260 million), Spider-Man 3 ($258 million) or Pirates of the Caribbean sequels ($300 million).
See "Nollywood: The Nigerian Film Industry by Harvard Kennedy School on http://www.isc.hbs.edu/pdf/Student_Projects/Nigeria_Film_2008.pdf, which every literate person in Nigeria and others in the world should read

The realities in Nollywood are different from the booming headlines, because majority of the actors and directors are living in poverty from Lagos to Asaba.

Majority of the filmmakers are not well paid for their movies by the leading multinational cable TV network, MultiChoice Nigeria of the MultiChoice Group and many of them just wanted to have their movies on the DStv Channels of MultiChoice such as the Africa Magic for the publicity. Then only few of them smiled to the bank from the box office revenues of their movies distributed and exhibited by local film distributors and cinemas. The cinemas have not been making enough for a so called booming film industry without a film market. The highest grossing Nollywood movie from the box office in Nigeria, Funke Akindele- Bello's "Ọmọ́ Ghetto, The Saga" made less than N700 million which is not even up to the monthly incomes of the co-CEOs of Netflix, Reed Hastings who  earns more than $40.8 million annually and Ted Sarandos who  earns more than $38.2 million annually.
So, Nollywood is still far from the news headlines of a booming film industry.

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#film #netflix #filmmakers #africa #nigeria #network #india #school #bank #filmmarket #distribution #cinemas #actors #directors #spiderman #avatar #harvard #movies #dstv #multichoice #asaba #budget #hastings #sarandos #news #africamagic #piratesofthecaribbean

Yara Shahidi Becomes Global Ambassador of Dior

 

DIOR MAKEUP NAMES YARA SHAHIDI A GLOBAL BEAUTY AMBASSADOR 

THE FRENCH FASHION HOUSE NAMES THE ACTRESS AND ACTVISIT YARA SHAHIDI AS DIOR'S NEW GLOBAL BRAND AMBASSADOR 

Yara Shahidi is Christian Dior's newest global brand and beauty ambassador, alongside Christian Serratos and Sam Visser celebrating the designs and creations of Women’s Creative Director, Maria Grazia Chiuri, and Creative and Image Director of Makeup, Peter Philips. She joins the league of other Dior brand ambassadors Natalie Portman, Jennifer Lawerence,and Cara Delevingne. 

Shahidi worked with Dior earlier this year for International Women's Day for "Dior Stands with Women," a project created by Charlize Theron Africa Outreach Project for female-led education. Off-screen, Shahidi is a full-time student at Harvard University where she is earning a B.A. in Social Studies and African American studies. She uses her social media platform to support Black Lives Matter and WeVoteNext while also dedicating her time to public speaking with leaders such as Dr. Angela Davis, President Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and First Lady Michelle Obama. 

Source https://www.crfashionbook.com/celebrity/a36914394/dior-makeup-names-yara-shahidi-a-global-beauty-ambassador/

UNITY Calls for Release of Al Jazeera Journalist Dorothy Parvaz

Dorothy Parvaz


6 May 2011 14:00 Africa/Lagos

UNITY Calls for Release of Al Jazeera Journalist Dorothy Parvaz

PR Newswire

MCLEAN, Va., May 6, 2011

MCLEAN, Va., May 6, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- UNITY: Journalists of Color is calling on the government of Syria to release Al Jazeera reporter Dorothy Parvaz and allow her to continue her important work in the country.

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20110506/DC97026 )

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20110310/DC62460LOGO )

Parvaz, a former reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and a 2009 Nieman Fellow at Harvard, was apparently detained shortly after arriving in Damascus on Friday to cover anti-government protests in the country. Al Jazeera has been told by Syrian officials that they're holding Parvaz. She is a citizen of the United States, Canada and Iran. She joined Al Jazeera in 2010.

UNITY joins the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University and other media organizations in urging President Bashar al-Assad to immediately free Ms. Parvaz, and to cease efforts to hinder the work of the international media.

UNITY believes that a free press is one of the pillars of a democracy and it is our hope that Syria will adhere to the principles that guarantee the free flow of information and ideas.

About UNITY: Journalists of Color




UNITY: Journalists of Color, Inc. is a strategic alliance advocating news coverage about people of color, and aggressively challenging its organizations at all levels to reflect the nation's diversity. UNITY is comprised of four national associations: Asian American Journalists Association, National Association of Black Journalists, National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and the Native American Journalists Association together with an outreach to more than 8,000 journalists of color. In addition to planning the largest regular gathering of journalists in the nation, UNITY supports research and advocacy initiatives that promote its mission. For more information on UNITY, visit www.unityjournalists.org, email info@unityjournalists.org or call (703) 854-3585.

Media Contact:

Onica N. Makwakwa, Executive Director

UNITY: Journalists of Color, Inc.

Tel: (703) 854-3585

executive@unityjournalists.org

SOURCE UNITY: Journalists of Color

Web Site: http://www.unityjournalists.org/

Nigeria: The Abyss of Ignorance in the Land of Fools

I stood with the vendors under the flyover at the Obafemi Awolowo Road roundabout in Ikeja, Lagos. I was waiting for Kazeem the Chairman of the vendors to bring copies of a magazine we needed for our advert executives. I loved to watch the rush hours of the morning and evening as commuters hurry to their different destinations. Most of them seemed ill at ease and I did not blame these people who are traumatized by the irony of living in the most populous country in Africa with abundant human and mineral resources but ranked among the poorest of the poor in the world. Nigerians are in the turmoil that would be best dramatized as Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka’s Season of Anomie.

The manufacturing industry has collapsed and many of the leading banks have crashed in the meltdown of the Nigerian Capital market and aptly illustrated by the prolific Nigerian novelist Bisi Daniels as a tower of Babel.. The shocking report that over 20 million Nigerian youths are unemployable and they are even ignorant of this fact and have chosen to wallow in the troubled waters in resignation of their fate in the hands of their brazenly corrupt rulers whose sons and daughters and arse-kissers continue posing and posturing with their false airs and graces in Nigeria, but cannot walk tall among "The real McCoy" in the developed countries. Even the only Nigerian bank that seemed to have escaped my danger list Skye Bank Plc has just admitted that it had swung to a 12.63 billion naira ($85 million) pretax loss in the 12 months to Sept. 30, compared with a pretax profit of 20.42 billion naira in the same period last year.


Inside Lagos city

It was Karl Maier Who saw it all in This House Has Fallen: Midnight in Nigeria, but as I feared, the sick patient refused to accept the diagnosis of his crisis and chose hemorrhaging instead of taking the bitter pills. And millions of her equally ignorant retards prefer to waste their time chasing shadows on Facebook that they are abusing and misusing as a dating site and are really clueless on why Mark Elliot Zuckerberg and his Harvard classmates Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin and Chris Hughes created and launched it on February 4, 2004.

Well, what can these millions of the vacuous youths do in a nation sinking in the abyss of ignorance?

I do really feel sorry for them as I see them hanging around and loitering with their cell-phones and sagging pants with their heads in the clouds while their visionless rulers in their stinking corridors of power bury their heads in the sand like ostriches. I wonder how many of the millions of them on Facebook have even attempted to develop applications on the Facebook Platform. How many of them can compare themselves to the First Class scholar Reuben Abati who had his Ph.D at 24 and Ben Okri who won the Booker Prize for his classic novel The Famished Road when he was 32 and many of us who were already authors and editors of national newspapers and magazines when were in our early 20s. I do feel sorry for them, because they are wasting away as they are celebrating their ignorance and mediocrity in their banal Hip-hop songs and pornographic videos, but cannot mention three books they have read since January to date. A generation of Intellectual morons? No. They are the Lotus-eaters of a generation sinking and wasting in the the abyss of ignorance in the land of fools.


Obafemi Awolowo Road, Ikeja, Lagos.

The greedy political contractors in power are misplacing our priorities and scuttling the great prospects of the innovations developed by the Nigerian intelligentsia of gifted artists, scientists and scholars who have proposed practical solutions to the problems plaguing the nation.

Millions of Nigerians say that Nigeria was better under military rule and have recalled that even though the country was bad under military tyrants, the corrupt shareholders of the ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP) have made things worse.

It is unfortunate that the majority of the youths have decided to join in the rat race of the crooks and rogues and careless about nation building.
The youths must stop fooling themsleves by aping the Joneses and take up the challenges of the 21st century as the visionary youths of the Asian Tigers are doing and they are making great progress in the world.


Our destinies are not in the stars, but in our own hands.