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Veteran Nollywood actor, Chinedu Ikedieze, popularly known as Aki has said if the major problems in the film industry are solved, movie stars will give their best and bring out beautiful movies that will be relevant for a long time.
The ‘Aki and Pawpaw’ star, in a recent interview with Naija Mouth-Piece, revealed apart from piracy, hoodlums and lack of government support are the major challenges facing the Nigerian film industry.
He said hoodlums often invade movie locations to order filmmakers to pay a certain amount of money before they are allowed to shoot.
He said: “People are feeding fat on other people’s intellectual properties and it’s not good for the business [filmmaking].
“Another thing I want to pinpoint that I see as also part of our challenges is, the kind of relationship we think we would get from people that we are not getting. If you go to shoot [movie], louts will disturb. They will destroy your camera and even fight you. And those people don’t know how that place came about. They are not paying tax. They are not contributing anything, but they would ask you to pay for the place you want to shoot the movie.
“To even use parastatals to shoot, is another problem. The government finds it difficult to release their parastatals for us to use to shoot. To shoot at airport, you will apply before they would allow you to shoot at airport. Government is a very big challenge.
“Sometimes, we will script epic stories that would depict Nigeria in a good light, but because of all these things [bottlenecks], we will begin to manage. We will be looking for ways to cut down the production so that we would achieve a little bit of what we had in mind.
“If we have all these things at our beck and call, of course, it would be easy. We will give in our best and we will churn out wonderful movies that would stand the test of time.”
