This year’s Cannes Film Festival saw the first ever film from Nigeria – Akinola Davies Jr.’s debut feature My Father’s Shadow – selected in the lineup and, in another first, the country’s culture minister Hannatu Musa-Musawa touched down on the Croisette to unveil Nigeria’s ambitious plans to take its creative industries to new heights.
Speaking at Deadline’s Cannes Studio, the Minister of Art, Culture, Tourism and the Creative Economy said that “Nigeria is having this great global moment.”
“It is very important for us as a nation to see what we can do to leverage on the interest in the content and creativity that comes out of Nigeria, that the global community seems to have on Nigeria, and to build something long term and sustainable,” she said.
Nigeria’s government recently unveiled its growth plan dubbed “Destination 2030 Nigeria”, which will look to establish the African nation as a leading global hub for arts, culture and creativity. The plan, she said, is to create more than two million jobs in tourism and the creative industries and contribute $100M to Nigeria’s GDP within the next five years. Already the federal government has secured $300M in investment for the ministry.
“Nigeria is a big population with about 240 million people and in 2050, Nigeria will be the third most populous country in the world,” Musawa said. She pointed to the fact that 70% of that population “is under the age of 17.”
“You have a growing population that don’t have jobs,” she said. “They’re slightly disillusioned and slightly apathetic and why? It’s because there’s nothing really to sustain them. Many of the Nigerians that are growing up are very impoverished. They don’t have access to oil companies or even to basic education so what we see is a huge resource within the creative industries because in every single locality they have the ability to create content with their phones – it’s all within the creative industry.
“So, in identifying the creative industry as something that is going to be long term and sustainable for this growing population is something that is very important to us.”
The Minister expressed how “proud” she was of Davies Jr.’s debut My Father’s Shadow, which played in Un Certain Regard in Cannes this week. Deadline’s Pete Hammond said in his review that the film “is also one of the most moving and universally relevant and emotional films of any in this year’s fest.”
Credit: Deadline
