• NFVCB’s clarification on smoking, ritual film policy is welcome
Just as well the National Film and Video Censors Board (NFVCB) has clarified its reported “ban” on smoking and ritual scenes in films.
“NFVCB aims to classify, not stifle creativity, ensuring appropriate ratings for content depicting tobacco or nicotine product,” Shaibu Husseini, its executive director and chief executive officer told ‘Premium Times’. Well said!
To be clear: money rituals have reached an alarming level, what with the evil of the so-called “Yahoo-Yahoo Plus”: a ritual that often takes life. Smoking is another public health nuisance, since it always seems to precede using far more dangerous drugs, especially among impressionable youths, coping with evil peer pressure.
But to counsel moderation on how such scenes are treated is one. To purport to ban such scenes in films is another.
Indeed, “banning” any creative activity would be awkward: first, for the creatives themselves, as it would clearly stifle their muse; and then, the society.
Every film or video worth its salt, even as it entertains, takes the audience through the correction of societal ills: smoking, excessive drinking and allied drug abuse; and the rat race for wealth-without-sweat, which powers money rituals. They are all cravings that ultimately end in tragic cul-de-sacs.
Besides, which is more correct: art imitating life or life imitating art?
Art imitating life is a canvass on which all creativity sketches, draws or paints. The raw material for every creative prose, happy or sad poetry, the theatre, film or radio plays, comes from the society itself. So, art imitates life to correct such, by using teachable moments in the creative works to home in on the message.
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At a few times, life may indeed, imitate art. But those are few occasions when a particular scene or plot in a film, novel or play, looms large in life; and the receivers somewhat experience a feeling deja vu. Yet, it is fiction turning real life!
Which brings the subject back to the NFVCB message. The event was a road show in Enugu, tagged “Smoke-Free Nollywood”, which NFVCB organised with Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa (CAPPA), and invited its stakeholders.
The event was to brief the stakeholders — film producers, actors, directors and the various guilds that work in the industry — on the latest government thinking; and to engage them on the policy thrust.
Yet, what emanated from it all, from media reportage, were a purported “ban”. In the umpteenth bid to cut to the chase by doing interpretive reporting, the media only misled the reading public with banner headlines purporting a “ban”. That clearly is not good enough and the media can do much better.
By the way, how do you “ban” rituals in films when rites and rituals are basic to life itself? Every religion, foreign or traditional, floats on own rites and rituals. Without those, you can’t fully practice the faith.
How can you then ban rituals in films when it is routine in real life? And if you did, how can you use films and allied creative works to correct the wanton abuse of those rituals: as a traditional medicine (wo)man putting rare knowledge of traditional rituals to evil use — in money rituals that procure fellow citizens’ lives for money?
The message is — or ought to be — clear: film makers have the onerous responsibility to treat these scenes with utmost sensitivity, which nevertheless must end only one way: crime does not pay; money rituals lead to eventual self-ruin — as being excellently depicted in “Glass House”, a serial now on the premium belt of DSTv. It shows how ritual money had plagued — and would eventually ruin — both protagonist and antagonist.
A generation of Nigerians that gobbled those crime thrillers, the famed novels of James Hadley Chase , would readily attest to such sophistication in treatment. No matter how iron-cast the crime was planned, Chase had one ending: you do crime at your own peril.
That is the standard of treatment film makers must attain. Even then, the NFVCB conk — the rating that restricts audience exposure — awaits works that fall below the expected thresholds.
