{"id":3750,"date":"2006-03-25T16:01:47","date_gmt":"2006-03-25T16:01:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/hollywood-bollywoodnollywood.html"},"modified":"2006-03-25T16:01:47","modified_gmt":"2006-03-25T16:01:47","slug":"hollywood-bollywoodnollywood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/hollywood-bollywoodnollywood.html","title":{"rendered":"Hollywood, Bollywood…Nollywood"},"content":{"rendered":"

with a religion connection…<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

Now playing across Nigeria: The saga of a church that self-produced a few films and became an instant mogul in the country’s giant movie marketplace known as Nollywood.<\/p>\n

It’s the latest \u2014 and perhaps most audacious \u2014 foray into mass culture by the Redeemed Christian Church of God. In less than a year, the church’s Dove Studios has gone from Nollywood greenhorns to barons.<\/p>\n

Dove has several hits under its belt, a pile of scripts from Nollywood’s top filmmakers and the foundations for a nationwide distribution network that eventually could give it make-or-break influence over the entire industry \u2014 which churns out more than a dozen new films on DVDs and videos each week and is the principal entertainment market in Nigeria.<\/p>\n

"We’re looking to make crossover movies," said Ope Banwo, head of the church’s World Dove Media Plc., which includes a satellite television division, a celebrity-oriented magazine and state-of-the-art studios that produce music videos and other works. "Our idea was to use popular, secular actors so the guy on the street doesn’t know what’s coming at him. … We’re softly getting him to watch evangelism."<\/p>\n

The church stormed into Nollywood with its first four movies last year, including the English-language "The AIDS Patient" about an infected woman cured by the Holy Spirit and "Agan" (or "None Shall be Barren"), a story in the local Yoruba language about a pastor and his wife who finally conceive a baby after deep prayer.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

with a religion connection… Now playing across Nigeria: The saga of a church that self-produced a few films and became an instant mogul in the country’s giant movie marketplace known as Nollywood. It’s the latest \u2014 and perhaps most audacious \u2014 foray into mass culture by the Redeemed Christian Church of God. In less than…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nHollywood, Bollywood...Nollywood - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/hollywood-bollywoodnollywood.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Hollywood, Bollywood...Nollywood - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"with a religion connection… Now playing across Nigeria: The saga of a church that self-produced a few films and became an instant mogul in the country’s giant movie marketplace known as Nollywood. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3750","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3750"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3750\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}