Finding a voice - Nollywood inspired filmmaking practices in Switzerland

Under the name Nollywood a unique video film industry has developed in
Nigeria in the last few decades, which now forms one of the world’s
biggest entertainment industries. With its focus on stories reflecting
„the values, desires and fears” (Haynes 2007: 133) of African viewers
and its particular way of production, Nollywood brings „lived practices
and its representation together in ways that make the films deeply
accessible and entirely familiar to their audience“ (Marston et al. 2007:
57). In doing so, Nollywood shows its spectators new postcolonial forms of
performative self‐expression and becomes a point of reference for a wide
range of people. However, Nollywood not only excites a large number of
viewers inside and outside Nigeria, it also inspires some of them to become
active themselves and make their own films. This effect of Nigerian
filmmaking can be found in many parts of sub‐Saharan Africa as well as in
African diasporas all over the world – including Switzerland (Mooser 2011:
63‐66).

As a source of inspiration, Nollywood and its unconventional ways of
filmmaking offer African migrants a benchmark that meets their wish to
express themselves as minority group in a foreign country. As Appadurai
(1996: 53), Ginsburg (2003: 78) and Marks (2000: 21) assume, filmmakers with
a migratory background have a specific need to express themselves through
media. As minority group members in their country of residence they not only
wish to reflect upon their situation within the diaspora and illustrate
their everyday struggles as foreigners, but to also express their own views
and ideas in order to challenge dominant public opinion (Ginsburg 2003: 78).
They attempt to “talk back to the structures of power” (2003: 78) they
live in. In this process, their audio-visual works become a means of
response and “an answering echo to a previous presentation or
representation” (Mitchell 1994: 421). The American art historian Mitchell,
therefore, suggests interpreting representation as “the relay mechanism in
exchange of power, value, and publicity” (1994: 420).

This desire of interacting with the local public has also been expressed
during a film project of African, mainly Nigerian, first-generation migrants
in Switzerland I am currently partnering in. Several cast and crew members
have expressed feelings of being under-represented, even misrepresented, in
the dominant Swiss media discourse. In order to create a form of exchange
and give themselves a voice, they consequently produce a Nollywood inspired
film and wish to present it to the society they live in. My partnership in
this on‐going film production (which forms the foundation of my PhD field
study) allows me to observe and experience this process. By employing
qualitative media anthropological methods and in particular Performance
Ethnography, I seek to find out more about the ways African migrants
represent themselves as a community through audio‐visual media and the
effect the transnational use of Nollywood has on their form of
self‐representations as well as the ways they express themselves.