In 1985 the Ethiopian famine claimed over a million lives. It was the first live TV broadcast of an African humanitarian disaster. The pictures of malnourished children still haunt the Northern imagination of Africa today. 1985 was also the year in which the Hollywood film Out of Africa was released. A love story between two Europeans set in colonial Kenya, it represented Africa as a space of excitement, for Europeans. Africa as backdrop, in which Africans played a marginal role. The film won 7 Oscars. These two narratives fundamentally shaped the way the North has imagined Africa over the last 30 years.

In 1992 Kenneth Nnebue, a Lagos electronic merchant, shot a film and put it onto blank videocassettes. Living in Bondage, the story of a man struggling to make it in Lagos, was a huge success selling over 500,000 copies. This is credited as the birth of Nollywood. The following year Helen Ukpabio produced and starred in End of the Wicked staging Christian beliefs against traditional African religion. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Africans all over the continent identified with the stories and the characters represented in Nollywood. Today it is the dominant media presence on the African continent.

This film project imagines a future in which Hollywood and Nollywood, two very different industries and narrative projects, fuse and cross-fertilise. Emeka, our hero, is an outsider director in the Nollywood scene. He stumbles across the story of Out of Africa and finds the idea of a film about Africa with no Africans both repelling and intriguing. In this future (for reasons which are not entirely clear) this film has been banned. All Emeka can find is one minute of shredded footage which he painstakingly pieces together. He decides to remake ‘Out of Africa’ as a Nollywood film.

Thanks to: Lagos Photo 2015, AAF Lagos. Supported by: Goethe Insitut Lagosfull project