August 28, (THEWILL) – Nollywood actor, Chinedu Ikedieze, better known as Aki, has highlighted some of the challenges the Nigerian movie industry, known as Nollywood, is battling with.
While granting an interview with media firm, Naija Mouth Piece, Aki made it known that piracy and lack of government support, are some of the challenges affecting Nollywood.
He added that hoodlums often invade movie locations to extort money from filmmakers before they can be allowed to shoot.
“People are feeding on other people’s intellectual properties and it’s not good for the business of filmmaking.
“Another thing I want to pinpoint that I see as part of our challenge is, the kind of relationship we think we would get from people that we are not getting.
“If you go to shoot, touts will disturb you. They will destroy your camera and even fight with you. And those people don’t know how that place came about. They are not paying tax. They are not contributing anything, but they would ask you to pay for the place you want to shoot the movie.
“To even use parastatals to shoot is another problem. The government finds it difficult to release their parastatals for us to use to shoot. To shoot at the airport, you will apply before they would allow you to shoot at the airport. Government is a very big challenge.
“Sometimes, we will write epic stories that would depict Nigeria in a good light, but because of all these bottlenecks, we will begin to manage. We will be looking for ways to cut down the production so that we can achieve a little bit of what we had in mind.
“If we have all these things at our beck and call, of course, it would be easy. We will give our best and we will churn out wonderful movies that will stand the test of time”, he revealed.
