In “Nollywood: The Untold Story”, Key Industry Players Get Nostalgic

The “Untold” in Nollywood: The Untold Story is a stretch. Nollywood has been told, retold and exported through countless documentaries and think pieces, making the word in the title feel more like a hook than a promise. What the film does instead is go a little deeper than the usual survey, and that depth is worth the price of admission. It offers fresh trivia and new perspectives, allowing some of the industry’s titans to recount their beginnings, including those who are now legends but were hungry newcomers when the video boom was still finding its feet. Segun Arinze is the clearest example. Hearing him recall those early days as a young man who had no idea he was part of history gives the film a warmth that no outside historian could supply.

The filmmakers are candid about why the documentary needed to exist. Director Oluwaseun Akinseloyin, who has spent two decades in the business, has argued that the industry’s history is patchy and that no proper record of it exists. His film, produced by Helen Ayagere and built around two years of interviews, is his answer: a brisk account of where Nollywood came from, where it stands and where it is headed. It succeeds on those terms. Newcomers will find a solid introduction, while insiders will get a refresher that still manages to surprise them. The cast reads like a roll call of the industry’s key players, with Kate Henshaw and Richard Mofe-Damijo among its most recognisable voices. As history catches up with the present, the film’s real subject emerges; the celebration of an industry that captured the world’s attention with little outside support, but it also becomes a case for the infrastructure that would allow it to earn what it deserves.

The history is handled with a briskness that suits a story most Nigerians already know in outline. IrokoTV is presented as a platform that took on piracy by making content legal, accessible and affordable, an example of the practical problem-solving the industry has often had to rely on. Netflix’s acquisition of Lionheart is framed as a turning point that opened a new era, signalling that Nigerian films had become worthy of the world’s biggest streaming platform. Covid19 arrives as a near-death experience, threatening a cinema scene that was already fragile. The film also acknowledges the industry’s eventual recovery. These milestones are familiar, but still welcome. We rarely get to hear so many people working in the industry reflect on its present condition in one place.

One of the documentary’s most striking voices is serendipitous: former president Goodluck Jonathan appears to discuss his pride in the industry’s contribution to Nigeria’s image abroad and its significance beyond entertainment. The filmmakers go further, crediting him as the first leader to take Nollywood seriously by giving it government attention, grants and incentives. This leads into the film’s political argument. Those same filmmakers describe that support as having all but disappeared in the years since, through the Buhari administration and into the present. They are not asking for charity. They want the government to invest in the infrastructure that every serious film industry needs, from cinema centres in local governments to makeshift screening spaces, with the same seriousness afforded to sports centres. The film points to China as an example of what deliberate policy can achieve: sustained investment in screens and protections for local films helped its industry reach the level of established global players within a decade. The argument is persuasive because it is practical. Nobody on screen is asking for a miracle, only for the government to treat an industry of this size as one worth building.

The strongest stretch comes when the camera hands the argument to the people responsible for getting films into cinemas. Yinka Ogun, Kingsley Ogoro, Kingsley Oriahi and Bolanle Austen-Peters make the case for cinemas as community institutions, not just screening venues, and for protecting a film-going culture that streaming has made easier to abandon. The statistic anchoring their frustration is almost absurd: a country with the continent’s largest film market has roughly 60 cinemas, while one speaker notes that a single city in India has more. The filmmakers see a direct link between this shortage and the revenue being left on the table. They imagine what a hit on the scale of A Tribe Called Judah, Nollywood’s first billion-naira grosser, could achieve if there were enough screens to accommodate its audience. It is the sharpest section because the stakes are tangible. A film can only earn what its screens can hold, and Nigeria has built an industry that has outgrown the rooms in which it plays.

Beneath this is a subtler argument about audience habits. Nigerian cinema, as these filmmakers describe it, lives and dies by three weekends: Christmas, Sallah and Easter. A film released outside these periods rarely breaks records, suggesting that audiences still see a cinema visit as an annual event rather than an ordinary weekend activity. The filmmakers want to change that, making cinema part of the regular Lagos weekend itinerary. Oriahi introduces the streaming half of the problem. A film can land on a platform and disappear from public conversation within days, undermining the shelf life of work that may have taken months or years to make. Streaming has brought money and reach, but not necessarily longevity. The film is candid about what that trade-off has cost.

The documentary is at its most human when it turns to life on set. Richard Mofe-Damijo, who has worked on productions abroad, highlights the gaps in regulation and insurance on Nigerian sets. Where insurance is non-negotiable elsewhere, injuries and other misfortunes here too often go unaddressed, leaving those affected to absorb the cost. Others discuss the grind that rarely makes it to the red carpet: brutal commutes, inadequate drinking water and long working days that audiences rarely imagine when they picture a film star. The point lands without sentimentality. These are workplace conditions, and a documentary positioning itself as a record of the industry should address them plainly. By insisting that the work is far harder than it looks, the film quietly challenges the perception that Nollywood is all glamour and fast money.

If the documentary has a weakness, it is its structure. A film with this many recognisable names and grievances risks becoming a chorus, and Nollywood: The Untold Story does not always organise its voices into a single, coherent argument. The history and the policy case sit alongside each other without fully informing one another, while the late turn towards government support can feel like a different film grafted onto the first. Some of its strongest claims are also left at the level of assertion. Viewers may want to see the figures behind the China comparison or a clearer account of what the Jonathan-era incentives actually delivered. The film occasionally allows admiration to stand in for evidence. These are fair criticisms, but they are also the shortcomings of a documentary with more to say than it has room to explore.

What Nollywood: The Untold Story gets right is the people it trusts to tell the story. The veterans who built the business speak for themselves. They share fond memories, but do not stop at nostalgia. Instead, they leave the audience with an inventory of what the industry still lacks: screens, worker protections, insurance, and a government willing to show up. The history itself is not new, and the film is better for not pretending otherwise. Its value lies in the people recounting it and the demands they attach to it, making it a more compelling document of Nollywood’s present than its past.