The Costume Room: Dressing Fifty Years of Nigerian Characters
Ifeoma talks with a veteran costume designer about building the look of a village elder, a Lagos big man and a 1970s Lagos nightclub on a two-week shoot and a tight budget.
Living in Bondage, 1992: The Tape That Started an Industry
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Show notes
Living in Bondage, 1992
The story goes that Kenneth Nnebue had a warehouse of blank VHS tapes he could not sell, so he put a film on them. That film was Living in Bondage, and it sold hundreds of thousands of copies in Igbo and then in English. Ifeoma speaks with a veteran Onitsha distributor about what those first months were like.
- The blank tape problem and the decision to shoot a feature
- Why the Igbo language version came first
- How tapes moved from Onitsha and Alaba to the whole continent
- The business model of shooting in two weeks and selling in one
- What the 2019 sequel did and did not understand about the original
A monthly classic deep-dive to open the show.
Transcript
Hello, welcome to Nollywood Front Row. I am Ifeoma Okeke, I have produced four films in Lagos, and this is a show where I sit down with the people who actually make this industry run. For the first episode I wanted to go back to the beginning. In 1992 a trader called Kenneth Nnebue had a warehouse full of blank VHS tapes he could not sell. So he made a film to put on them. Living in Bondage was shot fast, in Igbo, with a story about a man who trades his wife for wealth, and it sold in numbers nobody had planned for. Today I am joined by a distributor who was selling those cassettes in Onitsha market in 1993. We talk about how it moved, who bought it, and how a film industry started by accident. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts. Front row, please.
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