Hustlers, home-wreckers and homoeroticism: Nollywood's Beautiful Faces

Abstract

This article examines the ways that Nollywood films are involved in the moral policing of the postcolonial subject both by challenging the state's moral failings and by enacting its ideological violence. I argue that although it is necessary to acknowledge how Nigerian video-films reflect the struggles, anxieties and instability of ordinary Nigerians, it is also crucial to examine the ways that they deflect various concerns about everyday life on to certain bodies. Through a close reading of Kabat Esosa Egbon's film Beautiful Faces (2004), a film about female campus cults, I demonstrate that while the film grapples with issues of violence and corruption on university campuses, it does so by channeling fears about students' educational opportunities into anxiety about women's sexual transgressions. In this way, I suggest that Beautiful Faces is typical of many Nollywood films that simultaneously challenge corrupt and wizened government institutions while also reproducing their normative and violent hetero-patriarchal position.

Weaponising Digital Architecture: Queer Nigerian Instagram Users and Digital Visual Activism

“…Many of these studies have been sociological in orientation, drawing attention to the social attitudes, health outcomes and psychological effects of the prevailing societal orientation on the wellbeing of Nigerian queers. In addition, there have been interrogation of queerness from the literary and filmic angles [23][24][25]. This viewpoint has also been richly explored as more creative ventures continue to engage the reality of queerness in Nigeria.…”

The Conflict of sexuality in Films: Analysis of Nollywood depiction of Homosexuality

“…Equally, Abah (2012) reports that from the cultural submission of Africans on homosexuality as projected by media as a societal educator, the underlying position of Nollywood on homosexuality is portrayed as a subject or object typical of the western world. Specific analysts have sufficiently tended to the possibility of lesbianism in these movies (Azuah, 2008;Green-Simms, 2012). It was that Nollywood got brave enough to address male homosexuality.…”

THE “OSUOFIA” CONNECTION: NOTES ON A NOLLYWOOD FILM CYCLE - Reginald Ebere and Abel “Success” Ebere, directors. Osuofia in Brazil. 2013. 211 minutes. English, Igbo, Yorùbá, and Pidgin. Nigeria. O-Gabby Innovations Ltd. No price reported. - Kensteve Anuka, director. Osuofia the Village Teacher.2014. 105 minutes. English, Igbo, and Pidgin. Nigeria. Global Update Movies. No price reported. - Emeka Nwosu, director. Osuofia and the Widow.2014. 140 minutes. English, Igbo, and Pidgin. Nigeria. O. Godwin Innovatio

“…The films that I review here certainly share a series of representational strategies and thematic concerns, but that is all the more reason to dispense with the name “Osuofia” as the glue that holds them together. The obsessive, genre-building invocation of this beloved film character only contributes to the difficulty of drawing legitimate generic boundaries in Nollywood—a difficulty that several scholars, from Jonathan Haynes (2013) and Moradewun Adejunmobi (2002) to Lindsey Green-Simms (2012) and Matthew H. Brown (2013), have confronted head on. It is, in many ways, a difficulty that has long plagued studies of African cinema, with such scholars as Manthia Diawara (1992), N. Frank Ukadike (1994), and Kenneth W. Harrow (2007) offering frameworks for classifying films that have not had the benefit (or the burden) of boundary-drawing marketing campaigns, or of industrial systems designed to consolidate and promote particular genres.…”