By Benjamin Njoku

Concluding part of our special report on Project Act Nollywood. The first part was published last week.

Romanticizing the issue will take us nowhere

What the industry needs from President Buhari at the moment is not grants or loans. This is least in our long list of challenges. The President should create enabling environment for us. He has started with a near stable power supply in most parts of the country. We must have in place a verifiable, auditable, open and accountable distribution framework in place. Sledge hammer must be slammed on pirates and other intellectual property thieves.

Andy-Amenechi

All the relevant copyright protection treaties Nigeria signed in the early 90s at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) level must immediately be ratified and domesticated for effect. Free import duty on production equipment must be granted the industry. We must enjoy some tax holiday regime. We need at least one Federal or State Government-owned basic cinema hall in each of the over 700 Local Government Areas in the country.

This will boost the few currently owned by the private sector. The government needs to sign co-production treaties with other notable film making countries of the world with all its attendant benefits. We need a film village or villages. We need the Motion Picture Practitioners Council (MOPICON) document to be dusted and presented to the National Assembly as an Executive Bill and passed into law as soon as possible,’ Alex Eyengho stated.

The project must be sustained!

On his part, veteran filmmaker, Zeb Ejiro, urged the present government to continue with the project, describing it as ‘a good idea for the industry.’ “I am convinced that President Buhari will continue the project. I want the president to conclude one of the segments of the project that has not take off before Jonathan left office which was the distribution scheme. The administration is trying to settle down, and once it does so, Project Act will be back.

For Ejike Asiegbu, who is one of the beneficiaries and Emma Isikaku, former chairman of movie marketers, there is need for the government to sustain the project. “Government should sustain the project. The industry has benefited immensely form it. A lot of us are on location shooting films, and employing a lot of our youths,” Asiegbu said.

But respected film maker, Emem Isong lamented her inability to access the fund, blaming her ill-luck on lack of transparency that plunged the disbursement of the fund. “I applied like every other person, but they did not consider me fit to access the fund. May be, it was because I have no god-father to make a case on my behalf,” she lamented.

Supporting the need to sustain the grant, Andy Amaenechi,President of the Directors Guild of Nigeria, urged the present administration to boost the distribution arm of the industry. He described as ‘frivolity’, the allegation that some beneficiaries used the fund to marry new wife and acquire new cars. “ It is a good thing for the industry and we want the continuation. We want the new administration to follow the trend which is good,” he said.

Zik Zulu Okafor, President of the Association of Movie Producers,AMP, also frowned at the allegation that the beneficiaries have mismanaged the fund, insisting that it has helped to boost production in Nollywood. “ As I am talking to you now, I am just returned from California with over 20 new producers for a programme they did there.|”

Zik-Zulu

Last year, the Federal Ministry of Finance has said 32 movie firms, which successfully passed through rigorous assessment processes, have won grants from the Film Production Fund, one of the three components of the N3 billion Presidential Intervention Fund for the Nigerian movie industry – Project ACT Nollywood. Also, the number of practitioners that have received grants under the Capacity Building Fund, the second component of the project and whose implementation started earlier, has climbed to 67 to further underscore the progress which the presidential intervention is making.

According to a statement from office of the Coordinating Minister for the Economy and Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the 32 film projects from these companies were selected out of the 38 that applied for the Film Production Fund for the first batch of interviews concluded last week.

The statement signed by Mr. Paul Nwabuikwu, Special Adviser to the minister, about 253 applications were received from film production companies during the application period, which spanned between November 11, 2013 to February 28, 2014.

The Film Production Fund (FPF) is a N700 million instrument, which allocates grants to production companies and independent producers for the making of commercially viable films at any stage of production.

This includes pre-production (scripting, budgeting, location, cast and crew; production (shooting, film set); post-production (editing, sound, and graphics), and marketing/distribution/exhibition (selling the movie to audiences).