By Muhsin Ibrahim The uproar over Sultan Abdurrazak’s Film House in Dorayi is astonishing, though, on reflection, perhaps not entirely surprising. There are several film houses in Kano, Kaduna, Jigawa, Gombe, and elsewhere. The films we watch and discuss, and sometimes quietly enjoy, are shot in those very houses. Why is this one different? Why is this one being rejected? This is not, after all, the first time such a proposal has met with hostility. When the federal government under President Muhammadu Buhari proposed building a dedicated Film Village to serve as a production hub for the Nigerian film industry, the reaction in many Northern circles was swift and dismissive. Critics saw it as a government-sponsored gateway to moral corruption, a physical infrastructure for an industry they would rather see disappear. The Film Village never materialised, at least not in the form envisioned, and the opposition it generated revealed something important: many people’s problem is not w...
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