FYI from the Daily Sun
http://www.sunnewsonline.com/webpages/features/showtime/2011/oct/21/showtime-21-10-2011-001.html
Using indigenous films for cultural revival
By SIMEON MPAMUGOH
Friday October 21, 2011
The fifth edition of the Festival of Indigenous African Language Films (FIAF),
which held at the Owena International Hotels, Akure, Ondo State, had come and
gone. The scholarly event showcased films in African languages, with the theme:
Film, Economy and National Development.
The fiesta was the brainchild of Remdel Optimum Communications Limited. The
outfit headed by soft-spoken broadcaster of many decades, Mrs Biodun Ibitola,
put up a sterling show that attracted scholars who brainstormed on the need for
indigenous African language films to promote culture, value, and development as
well as empowerment of women filmmakers.
Speaking during the welcome cocktail, Ondo State Commissioner for Culture and
Tourism, Mr Deji Faleye, espoused the benign environment and tourism potentials
of the state for visitors and filmmakers to shoot their movies. He highlighted
the scenic topography and hospitable nature of the people, which makes it a
destination point for tourists adding that the state is into the enterprise of
making Ondo State what California is to the United States.
In her opening remark, the festival director, Mrs Ibitola, explained that the
festival was to broadly expose indigenous African Language films with a view to
exporting the intrinsic values and potentialities of Nigeria’s rich culture to
other civilizations. She said, if that was done, it would benefit the
endangered local languages.
She stated that FIAF also strives to revamp the apparent relegation of African
cultural heritage in favor of foreign ideas, concepts and culture that
undermine the nation’s innate potentials for growth, progress and development.
She said that the time was ripe for Africans to combine traditions that are
unique to culture, with available modern economic, scientific and technological
resources for the necessary development that we strongly desire through
filmmaking.
Her words: “Filmmakers must seek to optimize our cultural potentials for our
economic well-being. We must emulate the emerging prosperity in East-Asian
countries where people hold on to their values and at the same time, earn for
themselves, higher living standards that surpass those obtainable in some
industrialized world.”
She revealed that this year’s festival sought to mobilize filmmakers and
stakeholders in the entertainment industry to pay attention to the
opportunities for growth and development within the context of our cultural
realities.
She added that since culture has been universally acclaimed to rank alongside
education, science and communication as indicators of real development, it
behooves on all to mobilize others culturally. She urged governments from the
local councils to the federal level as well as established institutions created
to have oversight functions on film and culture, to wake up to their
responsibilities.
In her message to the practitioners, Ibitola charged them to discharge their
responsibilities to the continent and their respective countries and families
by connecting to their environment, traditions and heritage as expressed in
their languages, adding that economic advancement, political prominence and
technological breakthroughs are indications of the cultural make up of the
people involved. “Any people that despises their cultural heritage will find it
difficult to excel economically and will be technologically difficult. This is
supported by history and law of nature,” she added.
In his presentation entitled: Language of indigenuity and the Nigerian Cinema,
Professor Onookome Okome of the Department of English and Films Studies,
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, said that the estimation of Nigerian
Cinema has always been different depending on who is involved at one point or
another, adding that by estimate, Nigeria’s Nollywood employs more people than
any single branded industry in Nigeria.
He said that the industry has done so much, what government has been trying to
do for many years pointing out that in less than 20 years, Nollywood industry
had reshaped the image within and outside the country.
According to Okome: “The industry is an image making organ that has
demonstrated that we can truly take care of our image, protecting it the way we
want and allow others to criticize it as evidenced by government’s promulgation
of the indigenization decree.
Though it was not properly articulated and implemented.”
He disclosed that “while Nigeria has been busy discussing how to decolonize
television screens for the past 60 years, the Nollywood industry has done so in
less than 30 years, yet the success of the industry still has its own problems
that needs to be carefully articulated, since it bears on our very being as a
people.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
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