USA and Nigeria / 2007 / 58mins / Documentary / English

Now the most popular cinema in all of West Africa, the Nigerian film industry, known as Nollywood, has distinguished itself by shooting all films on digital video. This has allowed production schedules to be compressed and immediately brought to market; in Lagos it’s big. Nollywood is the third largest film industry in the world, generating $286 million US dollars a year. And yet this vibrant, profitable industry has been virtually unknown outside of Africa, until recently. Welcome to Nollywood tells the story of these films and their directors, actors and viewers.

Jamie Meltzer

Jamie Meltzer began his filmmaking career as a news stringer, shooting natural disasters, police chases and fires for San Francisco Bay Area TV News. His ten-minute documentary, Pegasus (1998), chronicled the adventures of a gay motorcycle club on a joy ride in Marin County. Jamie Meltzer’s feature documentary films have been broadcast nationally on PBS and have screened at numerous film festivals worldwide. They include Off the Charts: The Song-Poem Story (Independent Lens, 2003) about the shadowy world of song-poems, Welcome to Nollywood, an investigation into the wildly successful Nigerian movie industry (PBS broadcast, 2008), La Caminata (2009), a short film about a small town in Mexico that runs a simulated border crossing as a tourist attraction, and Informant (2012), which examines Brandon Darby, a radical activist turned FBI informant who has been both vilified and deified, but never entirely understood. Informant won the Grand Jury Prize at DOC NYC, and the Best Documentary Feature Award at the Austin Film Festival. Among other accomplishments, Jamie Meltzer has also taught in the Documentary Film and Video M.F.A. Program at Stanford University. True Conviction (2017), her feature-length documentary, follows a group of exonerated ex-prisoners who work to rebuild their lives, and struggle to fix the criminal justice system. The film was awarded a Special Jury Mention at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival. Learn More