Nigerian Times

Without doubt or dispute Chineze Anyaene's IJÉ the Journey is the most financially successful Nigerian movie at the local box office and won an award for setting a box office record in Nigeria. The second is Kunle Afolayan's Figurine . But in terms of screenplay and cinematography I rank Faruk Lasaki's Changing Faces above IJÉ . Would IJÉ have been so popular without Genevieve Nnaji and Omotola Jalade-Ekeninde? Of course Chineze did the right thing that any smart filmmaker would have done in Hollywood or Bollywood by using the most popular actors and actresses to attract their teeming fans to the cinemas. In fact IJÉ should have made more than $1 million in Nigeria alone if Chineze explored all the opportunities and possibilities by also showing the film in as many halls as possible and charging less than the tickets sold at the Silverbird Cinemas and Genesis Deluxe Cinemas. But she seemed to be satisfied with the amount she made in West Africa and is moving on to the n...

The much awaited Nigerian film at the cinemas Changing Faces will open to the public at the Silverbird Cinemas and other cinemas in Nigeria and Ghana from December 23, 2011. It is the Silverbird Cinemas Nigerian Movie for the Christmas and New Year holidays. It is the first Nigerian movie on the supernatural experience of the transference of evil spirits through sex. Changing Faces is the first major Nigerian movie to be dubbed in French for commercial distribution in France and francophone countries. The gripping romantic thriller has an international cast of Nigerian and British stars led by Marc Baylis, Keppy Ekpenyong-Bassey, Alex Lopez, Rachael Young, Ayo Mogaji and Adebowale Adesanya. Marc Baylis Keppy Ekpenyong The young filmmaker Faruk Lasaki is an international award winning director and one of the best graduates of the famous New York Film Academy (NYFA) where his short film Six Feet Below won the best short film prize for graduating students. See "Not a normal Nigeria...

The goal of Del-York International has always been to raise sponsorship to cover full tuition, feeding and accommodations for all participants of the training program from Nigeria's public and private sectors. While we recognize that the price for world class training by the New York Film Academy is a shock for most Nigerians, we have been able to raise support from Local companies who are invested in building the capacity of our nation's youth in the creative industries, which was recently recognized by the World Bank to have great potential for job creation and poverty alleviation. This year we received the generous support from our partners: NDDC, Edo State Government, Riverdrill Group, Pepsi and NAFDAC to sponsor 96% of the students currently attending the program in Lagos. We hope that this group of students will exceed the success rate of the graduates from the 2010 training program in Abuja, where 122 of the 400 graduate are presently employed in the entertainme...

Are Del-York International and the New York Film Academy not ripping off Ignorant Nigerians? It’s prohibitively expensive, even though we do need the training. Give us half that price and we’ll get the same kind of specialized resource persons from Asia to provide the same training. ~ Prof. Femi Shaka of the Department of Creative Arts, University of Port-Harcourt in Nigeria. The nascent popularity of Nollywood, the Nigerian digital film industry has attracted global attention since a UNESCO Report rated it the second largest movie industry in the world after the United States of America and ahead of India’s Bollywood. The largely homegrown industry has generated millions of naira and created thousands of jobs from Idumota in Lagos to Iweka in Onitsha and the environs in Eastern Nigeria where most of the producers and marketers hail from. Over 80 percent of the movies are home videos of what would be rated as B-movies and slapstick comedies of typical Nigerian st...