Not Every Indian Film is Bollywood and Not Every Nigerian Movie is Nollywood
Bollywood and Nollywood have been called the first and second largest film industries in the world for the production of the largest quantities of movies.
Bollywood is generally labelled as the Indian film industry. But it is not the overall representative of the film industry of India, because there is Tollywood, the popular Telugu film industry of Telugu language based in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana in southeast India. Bollywood, the Hindi language Cinema is based in the city of Mumbai (formerly Bombay).
Tollywood was first coined before Bollywood and has a filmmaking history of over 100 years since 1909 when the Father of Telugu Cinema, Raghupathi Venkaiah Naidu produced short films and showed them in different regions of South Asia and he built the first Indian-owned cinema halls in South India in 1921.
Tollywood is the second largest film industry in India by box-office revenue after Bollywood. And Tollywood films sold 233 million tickets in 2022, the highest among all Indian film industries. As of 2023, Andhra Pradesh has the highest number of movie screens in India.
The boisterous Telugu film industry has several Guinness World Records such as the Ramoji Film City, which holds the Guinness World Record as the largest film studio complex in the world.
The second highest grossing Indian film so far, is "Baahubali 2: The Conclusion", a 2017 Tollywood epic action film directed by S. S. Rajamouli following the current highest grossing Indian film "Dangal" a 2016 Bollywood biographical sports drama film directed by Nitesh Tiwari and produced by Aamir Khan and Kiran Rao.
I have written on the significance of the difference between Bollywood and Tollywood before on my Nigerians Report Online on Blogger.
Like Bollywood, Nollywood has been termed as the sobriquet of the Nigerian film industry since the name was coined by The New York Times in 2002. But the name Kannywood for the Hausa language film industry based in Kano was coined in 1999 before the The New York Times discovered Nollywood and said "it is like Hollywood" with starry-eyed guerilla filmmakers making dozens of movies daily from bootstraps budgets. All the movies were shot straight to video from handheld VHS cameras and sold in VHS tapes on the streets and stalls of Lagos and Onitsha before distribution to other countries across the borders to start the first indie film industry in Africa.
While Nollywood is largely based in the predominantly Christian
southern region of Nigeria, Kannywood is based in the predominantly Islamic northern region of Nigeria.
Adamu Halilu, the Father of Hausa language Cinema was the first Nigerian indigenous filmmaker with the documentaries, "It Pays to Care" (1955) and "Hausa Village" (1958) and later made the classic film, Shaihu Umar (1976), a story of African slavery based on the novel of the same name by Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, first Prime Minister of Nigeria.
The first Hausa language home video, "Tirmin Danya " was produced in 1990 in Kano.
The National Film and Video Censorship Board, (NFVCB) Abuja, started recording and censoring video films in Nigeria from 1995, and a total of 1600 Hausa video films were officially documented between 1995 and 2005.
Majority of the foreign film critics, journalists and scholars who claimed to be experts ignored Kannywood in their reports, features and books on the Nigerian film industry. Both Nigerian and foreign scholars have done comprehensive researches and published books on Kannywood. The most popular are Dr. Idi Adam; Dr. Abdulkareem Abdulrahman; Dr. Muhammad Muhsin Ibrahim;
Dr. Carmen McCain; Prof. Brian Larkin and Dr. Mahmoud Nourah Bamalli.
My NOLLYWOOD MIRROR® Series is the first publication that has celebrated the beautiful queens of Kannywood on the same pedestal as the beautiful queens of Nollywood in the second edition published in 2014 and distributed by Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other booksellers in hardcover version, paperback version and Amazon Kindle version.
Ike Ude's photo book, "Nollywood: Radical Beauty" ignored the stars of Kannywood.
The big problem of Kannywood is being under the dictatorship of the Islamic religion with majority of the actors, actresses and filmmakers being Muslims.
They are monitored by the Islamic police of Kano State and the other Sharia states in northern Nigeria with several cases of the violations of their fundamental human rights even in their private lives.
Nollywood Alpha Male actor Enyinna Nwigwe can hug and kiss the Queens of Nollywood, Genevieve Nnaji and Omotola Jalade-Ekeinde in a romantic movie, but he cannot even dare to hug and kiss Rahama Sadau, the Queen of Kannywood on screen without incurring the wrath of the Islamic watchdogs of Kannywood.
-By Ekenyerengozi Michael Chima,
International Digital Post Network Limited,
King of Kings Books International,
Screen Outdoor Open Air Cinema (SOOAC)
International Digital Post Network Limited,
King of Kings Books International,
Screen Outdoor Open Air Cinema (SOOAC)
Publisher/Editor,
NOLLYWOOD MIRROR® Series,
The first book series on Nollywood and the Nigerian film industry
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