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The Light Bringer Makeup artist Nick Barose puts the glow in some of Hollywood’s brightest luminaries. The Magazine talks to the man behind the makeup of Lupita Nyong’o about his love of colour and his debt to his native Thailand. by bek van vliet / portraits by benya hegenbarth with thanks to maduzi hotel bangkok
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ick Barose might be known as the makeup artist to the stars, but on this rainy, overcast day in Bangkok, he’s working in front of the lens. At the behest of our photographer he’s lying prone by a water feature on the deck of Maduzi Hotel’s courtyard, suit jacket on, face tilted up to catch what little light this dreary day affords. He’s surprisingly at ease, but then again Nick has made a career out of making faces look good on camera. This is his domain. Behind the scenes, Nick is one of the most sought-after figures in his industry. His makeup has featured in countless magazine fashion and beauty shoots in all the major titles – Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, InStyle, Elle, People, and various international iterations of Vogue. His client list includes Kim Cattrall (who gave him his initial break on the red carpet), Hailee Steinfeld, Cynthia Nixon, Kerry Washington, Emma Roberts, British actress Gugu MbathaRaw of Jupiter Ascending, and Kate Mara of House of Cards. Then, of course, there’s the person who brought Nick to an international audience: Lupita Nyong’O. It was Nick who decided that, for the 2014 Oscars, the Prada-clad Lupita Nyong’O should have makeup inspired by “Elizabeth Taylor on vacation in the Riviera.” With subtly smoky eyes, peach blush and bright orange lipstick (which, on Lupita, appeared coral), the star beamed on the red carpet, and shone at the podium during her acceptance speech, even while tears streamed down her face. Hollywood reporters and beauty writers were in thrall with her skin – poignant, given the role for which she won the Oscar. After the event, Nick was inundated with interviews on how he achieved her “flawless” red carpet makeup. He’s still called upon repeatedly to explain the stressfree way to apply under-eye concealer or "Create a Perfect Base." He has lately become quite the celebrity himself. Nick credits much of his success to his upbringing. Born Dilokrit Barose and raised in Thailand, he grew up on his grandmother’s property surrounded by a family abundant in women. Instead of playing football, he grew up playing dress-ups with his older sisters and girl cousins. His mother, a fan of classic
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Hollywood films, would talk to him about her favourite stars – Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly and the like – and show him her favourite old Hollywood films. When she went to work, he’d sneak into her room to emulate that glamour with her cache of fancy cosmetics. “My mum had a lot of Mary Quant and YSL and Dior makeup – a lot of fun colours,” he recalls. “I would put her makeup on myself or my sisters or cousins and we would dress up in her clothes and put on fashion shows. She’d get mad because we’d used up half a lipstick that she'd just bought. Back then, there was no Sephora; if you wanted YSL you had to ask your friend overseas to buy it and bring it back for you.” His grandmother’s place was a vivid palette from which inspiration could bloom. The house was festooned with tropical bouquets – flowers plucked from the garden. Outside, his father’s tropical birds flashed iridescent in their enclosures, a pet peacock slinking here and there between ferns. A fish pond added to the kaleidoscope – silvers, golds and reds – seeding, percolating his deep appreciation of colour. “It sounds ‘exotic,’” says Nick, “but it was an everyday thing for me to see: the flowers and the birds with gorgeous, vibrant feathers.” here are many misconceptions about the life of a Hollywood makeup artist. For one, Nick says, actresses aren’t divas – at least not his clients. Secondly, success doesn’t happen instantly. “Social media makes everything look like success can happen overnight, but it’s not like that,” he says. He started at the bottom, as did all his peers, and worked his way up from an assistant position. Thirdly – and importantly – there’s no need to try and force yourself into a mould, whether you’re an actress or a makeup artist. If there’s one thing Nick hates it’s uniformity, or trying to “correct” nonexistent imperfections. His style of makeup – “and it’s not really a style, but people always recognise it” – is to let the individual natural beauty and character of his clients
Social media makes everything look like success can happen overnight, but it’s not like that.
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My icons were darker skinned because I identified with them. I always thought, ‘Dark is beautiful too.'
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beam through. generally easy-going, slightly kooky, no-bullshit nature. Scroll “I always like to show the skin,” he says. “I don’t like the through his posts and you’ll see spoof tutorials for contouring idea of a clichéd ‘red carpet’ face, because it can be mask-like. (Nick wearing severe war-paint-style makeup stripes) and cat All of my clients have interesting faces and makeup can either eyes (Nick with drawn-on whiskers and cartoonish black kohl make them look more special or it can make them look like eyeliner). These sit amongst nature shots, backstage pics, jabs everybody else. The experience I had with my mum, my aunts, at the Kardashians, portraits of his mum and press clips of his my sisters, my cousins, helps me get a sense of who each client clients. There’s also the odd pic of Nick before he was famous, is. I try to get a sense of who they are and bring it out. I’m more before he’d left his studies in environmental design to pursue makeup artistry full-time. One about getting the vibe and just such photo depicts him at his making the person shine.” #FirstEverJob in his cousin’s Nick’s philosophy of restaurant in New York. The enhancing rather than boy in the photo could be from correcting or concealing has a parallel universe, no vintage opened up the door for him filter required. Perhaps Nick to work with a wide variety includes shots like this as a of faces and skin tones. One reminder to his followers – look at his client list reveals perhaps even himself – that an ability to bring a brightness he didn’t get where he is and radiance to practically any overnight. “Instagram can age range or ethnicity. Kim make it look like you got lucky, Cattrall and Rachael Harris are because there’s no backstory,” both over 40, and Lupita, Gugu he says. He loves the platform – and Tessa all fall within the it’s fun and it’s a great medium very broad category of “dark for artists and has garnered skinned.” Today, still, very little him lots of jobs – but those mainstream media attention manipulated final depictions is given to complexions any give no hint of all that led up to deeper than light olive, which that point. And for Nick, it had is part of the reason why Nick been a long time coming. now crops up constantly for his From Nick's Flowers After The Rain series. Recalling his trajectory from looks that cater to darker skin design student to assistant to tones. “celebrity” makeup artist, every anecdote reinforces this claim. “That’s something I’ve always been into,” he says. “I grew There was no lucky leap to fame – every step in the ascent up and you know, I’m dark. I’m dark for an Asian and I always of his career stands on the shoulders of the last. Going out at felt excluded growing up here in Thailand. When I try to buy night in Bangkok exposed him to fashion and allowed him to foundation here they don’t even have my colour. It’s a different dress up and do friends’ makeup. (“It’s a good thing Instagram mentality, and I got teased for my dark skin. So my icons didn’t exist back then,” he laughs. “I would have a lot of really were darker skinned because I identified with them. I looked embarrassing photos.”) His love of fashion led him to New York. through my mum’s magazines and saw Iman and Grace Jones Going out in New York allowed him to practice outrageous drag and listened to Diana Ross, and I always thought, ‘Dark is makeup on friends. With that experience he started working with beautiful too.’” a photographer friend doing makeup for models’ “paid tests.” Off the back of that he was able to jump into the industry for real, ick, as pointed out by the women’s lifestyle website working with the late, legendary, Kevyn Aucoin. refinery29.com, is not only a great makeup artist, he is a “Just before New York Fashion Week a photographer friend “hilarious human.” If you don’t have the benefit of meeting him in helped me write a letter to Kevyn,” recalls Nick. “I really didn’t real life, his Instagram account provides an apt summation of his
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think too much about anything, just thought I would write a of them are not. If they’re known for their work it just makes letter to this guy because I liked his work, I was a big fan. But it easier for me because they’re an actor, an artist, so we speak it was the right timing – he needed more assistants for fashion the same language.” week.” When Nick got the call from Kevyn, he thought he’d been All of Nick’s makeup artist heroes – Kevyn Aucoin “punked” by his friend, but it was the real deal calling to book included – developed themselves as photographers and took him for the Bryant Park runway shows. He believes Kevyn was their own photos. To this end, he has taken photography impressed by pictures of Nick and his friends in their clubbing classes and stages his own shoots, doing his models’ or his outfits and makeup. “They were bad,” he recalls. “But I think own makeup and retouching his own images. His photo series are catalogued on his website, they showed passion and that’s dilokritbarose.com, where you the most important thing. I was can see his influences laid just this kid with his drag queen bare. The role of strong friends and makeup on himself. women in his life bubbles up It was messy because I was just a in SuperWomen. The colour rookie, but he responded to that.” and mythology of Asia is Even after being booked for depicted in the Indochina Chic Bryant Park, it wasn’t smooth set of self-portraits. Memories sailing. Nick didn’t have a of his grandmother’s garden professional makeup kit. Up break though in Flowers After until then, he’d been using an the Rain art bin box filled with his mum’s Shooting self-portraits allows old makeup pots, “I even had an Nick to create a “big picture,” empty La Mer jar and had put controlling all the elements something else in it,” he laughs. In of an image. He can inhabit order to finance a new kit, he got that world, become part of a 750-dollar line of student credit the fantasy. He’s an emeraldand went to MAC, because they faced Prince Rama from the give makeup artists a discount. At Ramayana epic. He’s a turbaned, fashion week, Nick found himself red-painted Rajasthani man. backstage with models he’d only He’s a batik-shirted Sumatran ever seen in magazines – Linda, From Nick's Flowers After the Rain series. xxxxxxxxxx. holding a bantam rooster. A Christy, Naomi – and after that, Balinese barong dancer from he was booked to work more and the Dutch East Indies. more with Kevyn. “I got to learn on the job, it was almost like Back in the US after his brief, but well-Instagrammed trip going to Yale for makeup,” he says. From there, he rose through to Thailand, Nick is busy with awards season, “creating fun the ranks with the other assistants – the intern beauty editors and looks” with Lupita, and working on more magazine shoots. assistant photographers he’d become friends with over the years. He’s also spent some time doing Glam Squad interviews for The Magazine, getting styling and beauty advice from the f there’s one thing Nick wants to avoid it’s ending up “in industry’s most famous red carpet teams [see his “Hollywood’s a box.” People are too quick to label you in Hollywood, Glam Squad” interviews]. While we’re on the topic, it would he says, and he doesn’t want to be pigeon-holed into any be remiss not to get some wisdom from the current master of particular look, age or ethnicity – or, for that matter, any makeup. What timeless Nick Barose advice does he have to particular level of fame. “I’m called a ‘celebrity’ makeup artist help mere mortals get a Hollywood glow?” because I work with celebrities, but anyone can be a celebrity “Beauty shouldn’t be complicated, I think,” he now. I don’t want to just work with somebody because they’re says.“Sometimes it’s just the right lipstick. Sometimes it’s just famous. I mean, what are they famous for? All my clients are the right eyeliner.” In other words, as his Instagram account actors – I pursue them and I tell my agent I want to work with puts it, #DontKillYourOwnMagic. Let your inner light shine. them because I like their work. Some of them are famous, some
I’m called a ‘celebrity’ makeup artist because I work with celebrities, but I don’t want to just work with somebody because they’re famous. I mean, what are they famous for?
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products (not fakes) and have been sold abroad with the consent of the ot long ago, a friend of mine who lives in Paris mentioned brand owner. an incident she couldn’t quite let go. She’d met a chic senior executive visiting the French capital on business. To her astonishment, A profitable scheme this lady had revealed in full disclosure that she had a side job taking Thirty-six-year-old Myna (not her real name) has a regular job as a pre-orders on luxury goods – all on the company’s dime. While she secretary in a doctor’s clinic in Bangkok. She graduated from a fashion was working around the clock to complete her company’s tasks, she design course and has always been a fashion enthusiast. A few years was undertaking her own operation, completely separate from her ago she noticed online fashion businesses becoming popular, so she corporate job. thought she’d try her hand at retailing. She had a good idea at that My friend was neither judgmental nor furious. The incident point how online businesses operated, having been a discerning online perplexed her. She didn’t know that this kind of job existed and didn’t consumer herself. Myna started out selling shoes. Today her principle know how people could get away with it. My initial response was a merchandise also includes handbags, apparel and fashion accessories, sigh. Most of us have heard fragments of stories like this in passing. though shoes remain her best-selling products. When something doesn’t concern us directly, it’s easy to just dismiss it Eighty percent of Myna’s fashion items are either hand-carried with generalities, go back to our daily lives and forget about it. But this or freighted, while the other time the issue did more than just twenty percent is bought from pique my curiosity. local suppliers. Her stock is a The business of selling combination of counterfeited luxury fashion items without products and the real thing. authorisation, together with the The fake products are branded issue of counterfeit products, is Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Dior something quite prominent in and Hermes. Myna develops her Thailand. Yet there is little anyone market network through satisfied really knows regarding the legal customers and word of mouth. implications of it all. For a quick Her market consists mainly of course in the legalities, I got in office workers who operaate touch with Franck Fougere, an in and around Bangkok. There intellectual property expert and are also a few customers from the managing director of Ananda provincial areas. Intellectual Property, a patentWhile Myna was willing to and-trademark attorney firm in give an interview, I had a lot of Bangkok that also deals with difficulty getting in touch with anti-counterfeiting and litigation. An inside look at Thailand’s her because she was either away Turns out it’s surprisingly easy to counterfeit-goods market and on a buying trip to Korea or run an unlicensed-luxury-goods the double lives of its retailers. or replica-goods business. dealing with the tight schedule at “Hand-carry stock is usually the clinic, or at a seminar with the clinic staff. Naturally I wondered how she could manage her time. small and easy to carry on each trip,” says Franck. “Fast freights are “I do my own online business in the morning before I go to work and also efficient and rarely inspected. Even if the shipment is seized and after work,” she says frankly. She has plainly seen the opportunity and identified as fake, the loss is minimal compared to all the shipments that has gone for it. She knows that it is a reckless act to a certain extent but go undetected.” The products are often purchased online and delivered she also sees a lot of people flaunting their success in similar businesses. directly to consumers or to small distributors. You see straight-toTo that end, Myna is more concerned about online competitors both in consumer ads for fake products prolifically on social networks. Sellers Thailand and overseas, both of which are increasing at a fast rate. Some and importers evade tax this way, in some cases also circumventing even have the brick-and-mortar shop-front. As long as there is strong local laws such as Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations. demand, Myna is comfortable with this market system. Her net profit They also operate off-shore accounts making it difficult to stop trade each month from her online business is around 100,000 baht, much and/or locate the culprits. This rampant underground commerce is huge, more than she initially bargained for. and it covers not only real branded merchandises but also replica items. Online retailers like Myna are not the only people who hand-carry While it is obviously unfair to license owners, legal enforcement is the duty-free goods back to Thailand. Some tourists and airline crew difficult in practice. The waters get even muddier considering that some members have been known to do this either on behalf of retailers or as products fall under the category of “parallel imports,” allowed under business owners themselves. To address this issue, in June this year the certain conditions in Thailand, notably when the products are original
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by kritika buabusya / illustrations by terawat teankaprasith
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Thai custom authority issued a new duty-free limit of 10,000 baht on new personal items purchased overseas by incoming passengers. Tenthousand baht is a small amount when it comes to luxury purchases, and it curbs not only the volume of goods but also the spectrum of luxurybranded items entering the country with potential resale opportunities. Still, detection of these is random.
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of authentication is that the real brands provide a serial number.” What does it say about the group of people who support the unauthorised sale of such items, whether real or fake? What we consume can be evocative. At the root of it all is the peril of conformity. Some of us do believe that luxury fashion is a new religion and its totems – a handbag, shoes, or sunglasses – may be an amulet, talisman or charm. Consumers themselves would not put it in so many words; they may simply wish to be taken seriously when they leave the house, and through these status symbols they feel they gain legitimacy. We all dress to conceal and reveal – everything is part of the packaging. Some people are more extreme than others with the various degrees of luxury advertised on their person. There are no longer decrees such as Sumptuary Law to prescribe or forbid the wearing of specific styles by specific classes or persons – is this not a good thing?
Dark side of the black market Part of Franck Fougere’s job as an IP consultant is to help arrest counterfeiters and people involved in trading fake products. Fougere works with the Economic Crime Suppression Division of the Thai Police or the Department of Special Investigation (DSI) when a raid needs to be performed. Courts such as the IPIT Court will deliver a search or arrest warrant. Plain-clothes officers can be hired as well, on the day of the raid. Typically a raid costs anything from 30,000 to 200,000 baht, depending on the A false panacea size of the target. Another way of approaching the Do we really have a choice in what we wear? sellers is to carry out a market sweep where the Alison Lurie, author of The Language of Clothes, police go and talk to the sellers of a specific market. suggests it’s not as simple as throwing on an outfit Safety is a crucial issue in Fougere’s line of work. that suits us. As class barriers weaken and wealth Investigators, lawyers and even police officers are We all dress becomes more easily and rapidly converted to regularly threatened by mafia-type organisations to conceal gentility, it is the apparent cost of an outfit that and businesses. Some influential targets can’t be and reveal – has come to designate high rank. As a result, it raided or even touched. Enforcement of the law has everything is is assumed that people dress as lavishly as their its limits. Fougere remembers one occasion where part of income permits. There are social advantages to people came to his office in broad daylight and the packaging... conspicuously expensive attire. (Try to dress in the threatened his life. Investigators are also sometimes with some extreme opposite and you will not like the reaction the target and can be threatened at gunpoint. And people more you get, no matter how virtuous your attitude.) then there is the issue with corruption and local extreme In some cases – for those who can’t afford protection from the very officers who are supposed than others. luxury ready-to-wear, that is – it is “fake it till you to enforce the law. make it,” deceptive as that may be. Fashion has There is a striking irony in the fact that some always been about identity, and with counterfeit counterfeiters actually have other respectable goods on offer, more of us get to role-play an everbusinesses, fully registered with proper offices. widening array of stereotypes, made available They even invest their legitimate earnings into through more accessible high-end-looking garb. the trafficking of imitation goods. As for the We have reached a point in history where high status can be perceived punishment for the counterfeit-goods part of their operations – if caught, via garments that look expensive by virtue of their logo. the maximum penalty is 400,000 baht. Most infringers, however, are Thailand is famous for its trade in fake products, not only in fashion fined very small amounts, and few are imprisoned. The people arrested but in mechanical spare parts, medicine, cigarettes and even food. are often underlings. The big guys are never brought to justice. Ultimately, we all pay as citizens. If we cannot access certain videos on Is there a case for counterfeit manufacturers? Arguing against YouTube, order high-end merchandise online or enter trade shows as their legitimacy is all the money big brands pay for research and exhibitors, it is because we as a culture are notorious for copying. development, labour, registration, marketing and promotion, etc. On the We need to question why Thailand isn’t tougher when it comes to other hand, counterfeiters and their hawkers offer a better price to eager law enforcement and penalties. Parasitic businesses within the fashion buyers. Myna points out that many of her customers buy copies to use industry not only inhibit the efforts of those wishing to innovate, but the alternately with the real thing that they have at home to mitigate wear short-cuts and quick-profit systems with no transparency bring the entire and tear. In some cases the replicas are almost indistinguishable from industry down. We obviously have a skilled workforce, judging from the real branded merchandise, even though the prices are much lower. the craftsmanship of our imitation goods. So why not work with that, In this case the decision is easy for potential customers to lean towards develop more confidence and invent more original ideas? Designers and the imitation. “Copied products that we see in the market today are of businesspeople should be given support to start small, with the potential various grades of ‘craftsmanship.’ The good copies show no inferiority if to become big brands and create a different image for Thailand. you put them side by side with the real thing, and the only real guarantee
Kamila Andini’s The Mirror Never Lies.
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Asian Persuasion Around the region, emerging and mid-career filmmakers from Cambodia to Indonesia are making Southeast Asian cinema a force to be reckoned with. by kong rithdee
Cambodia
nce, Cambodian filmmakers were shackled to the nightmare of history. The present wasn’t meaningful when the cruel ghost of the past still lurked. All of the strongest Cambodian films of the past 20 years are documentary features on the subject of the Khmer Rouge atrocity and its bitter legacies, and the principle recorder of those pains and ideological follies is Rithy Panh. He made S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, about the horror of Tuol Sleng prison, and his career peaked with the 2013 autobiographical documenatary The Missing Picture, which recounts his story as a boy in one of Pol Pot’s labour camps. The film was nominated for the Oscar’s Best Foreign Language Film. In a way, the ghost of the Khmer Rouge past remains stubborn. But as generations shift, its black cloak has begun to slip away. In the past three years, young directors such as Davy Chou, Kavich Neang, and Kulikar Sotho, to name just a few, have slowly begun to put Cambodian cinema back on the map with more contemporary stories, or at least contemporary perspectives on the incorrigible claws of history.
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Davy Chou is a galvanizing force here. Born in France to Khmer parents, his homecoming movie was an exploration of the Khmer cinema’s 1960s heyday, just before Pol Pot arrived and spoiled the party. Golden Slumbers was one of the best-received films of 2011, with its mix of straight interview and nostalgic evocation of old Khmer films as well as their directors and producers, lost movie theatres, and a sense of crushed cinephilia. Showing the shift in generational sensibilities, Davy isn’t stuck in the past. Last year he made a short film, Cambodia 2099, an honest, offbeat fiction about young people of Phnom Penh who gather on Diamond Island, a man-made piece of real-estate full of highrises. “To me, Diamond Island represents the way young Cambodians see their country in the
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In a way, the ghost of the Khmer Rouge past remains stubborn. But as generations shift, its black cloak has begun to slip away. Davy Chou.
future,” Davy said to me last year. In the past two years, Davy has helped young Cambodian filmmakers groom their projects; one of them is Kavich Neang, whose documentary Where I Go, about a half-Khmer, halfAfrican boy who tries to locate the identity of his father, is a candid exploration of his country’s social issues. Meanwhile, in the fiction field, last year Kulikar Sotho released The Last Reel, a family drama and another fine example of how Khmer filmmakers try to reconcile the ghost of the past with the urgency of the present. The slumbers have gone, and Cambodia is ready for action.
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Davy Chou’s Cambodia 2099.
Laos
o they make films in Laos? Of course. Though not often, the time is now ripe and the passion is in place. Land-locked and still shell-shocked, young Lao directors lurch along with guts, luck and a little help from their Thai friends. Late last year, a group of young Lao filmmakers put out an ensemble Vientienne in Love (in the fashion of Paris Je t’aime and New York, I Love You); it was premiered at the Luang Prabang Film Festival. In 2013, Panumas
Anysay Keola.
Deesatha made Hak Um Lum, a romantic comedy set in a rural village, and which also made it to Thai cinemas. And back in 2011, Anysay Keola, who studied film at Chulalongkorn University, made his breakthrough Plai Tang (At the Horizon), a Tarantino-esque Lao thriller featuring a kidnapping and a revenge mission. The film was a sensation when it was released in Laos (there are multiplexes there now), for it was the first Lao film to show women in modern attire (shirt and skirt) and not in traditional pa sin. It was also the first Lao film in many decades to have guns in it. Anysay is a driving force of Lao New Wave, a gathering of young filmmakers who realise it’s high time to tell Lao stories. Their inspiration, as it happens, was the 2007 Thai-Lao film Sabaidee Luang Prabang, a romantic comedy shot in Laos by Thai filmmaker Sakchai Deenan and starring Lao-Australian actor Ananda Everingham, as well as Lao model Khamlee Pilawong. That film revived enthusiasm among Lao audiences and filmmakers, and many sequels followed; the success came at the right moment when Anysay and his friends came of age and felt that they should take the cinematic fate
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Anthony Chen’s Ilo Ilo.
A scene from Vientiane In Love.
Lei Yuan Bin’s 03-Flats.
of their country in their own hands. Next year will be busy. Xaisongkham Induangchanthy, another Lao New Wave director, is studying for his master’s in filmmaking in New York City, and his thesis film Those Below is about a young American man who travels to Laos in search of his estranged father. Shooting will start shortly in Laos. Meanwhile, female director Mattie Do will shoot her new film Dearest Sister in May. Anysay himself is hatching a new film with Ananda Everingham. Lao stories abound, and for these directors the time to tell them is now.
Singapore
or over a decade, Singaporean cinema has claimed its fair share of the spotlight, with such respected flagbearers as Eric Khoo and Roystan Tan, who have chronicled the joys and anxieties of the island city’s inhabitants. But a shot in the arm that electrified Singapore’s filmmaking community came nearly two years ago with Anthony Chen’s
Ilo Ilo, a heartfelt domestic drama about a boy and his Filipino maid set during the 1997 financial crisis. Ilo Ilo won the Camera d’Or for best first film at Cannes, the highest honour ever achieved by a Singaporean title, and the prize became a mark of national pride that also lit a fire for the country’s new generation of directors. Chen, 30, picked up the torch from the likes of Khoo and Tan, continuing the study of growing pains, social woes and forgotten struggles in a city perceived for its happy spotlessness. Ilo Ilo was a critical hit everywhere from Europe to Bangkok, winning several awards at various festivals (including a major coup at Taipei’s Golden Horses). While we await his second movie, Chen has expanded into another active role by setting up a production company that focuses on young filmmakers; its first project, Distance, is an omnibus featuring three directors, from Thailand, Singapore and China.
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The availability of government support in the arts – compared to the rest of the less culturally inclined Southeast Asian nations – means that while finding financing is never simple, young filmmakers in Singapore at least enjoy a glimpse of silver linings in their attempt to mount projects. Last December, the Singapore International Film Festival showcased a number of new Singaporean films by a batch of new directors whose works sketch the social landscape of their country. Among the noteworthy are Liao Jiekai’s As You Were, a tender drama about the persistence
of solitude; Lei Yuan Bin’s documentary 03-Flats, which looks at the lives of three women in government housing estates; and Tan Shijie’s short film Not Working Today, a look at the life of a migrant worker trapped in a faceless system that benefits most but not all. With another promising director, Boo Junfeng, having a new movie coming out this year called Apprentice, about a Singapore executioner – his previous, Sandcastle, was warmly received in Cannes three years ago. The Singaporean film scene is crackling with vitality. Keep watching it.
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Lav Diaz’s Norte, the End of History.
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The Philippines
t’s hard to name-check all the active volcanoes in Filipinio cinema, just because there are so many, and because the thriving independent film scene gushes forth new names and movies with a dizzying frequency. Presiding over the Pinoy crew is the long-haired, sage-like, joke-loving Lav Diaz, a master of very long movies (his films range from four hours to 13), but the strength lies in the Philippines’ riches of midcareer mavericks who fuse history, memory, poetry and hardship into the DNA of their films – Raya Martin, John Torres, Khavn de la Cruz, Adolfo Alix Jr, Sherad Anthony Sanchez, as well as the prolific Brillante Mendoza, who won Best Director at Cannes in 2009. This year, the Philippines’ representative to the Oscar is Diaz’s four-hour-long Norte, the End of History, a dense, soulful riff on Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. (It didn’t make the shortlist, but for the country to send
a daunting, demanding film like that to the Academy was a note of artistic pride.) The intellectual ambition of Diaz, who’s 55, is echoed in films by younger filmmakers as they delve into the colonial past, present-day concerns, and political allegories. Raya Martin’s How to Disappear Completely is about a girl who’s obsessed with disappearance, while earlier films like Independencia and Autohistoria are ruminations on national identity and historical ghosts. John Torres, meanwhile, is a visual poet of the doc-fiction hybrid, a gentle, deft user of strange footage and supernatural/political touch points. His latest film, Lukas the Strange, tells the story of a boy who grows to believe he’s halfman, half-horse, while Refrains Happen like Revolutions in a Song is an unclassifiable essay on individuality, tradition and society. To many critics, Martin and Torres – despite the cult-like appeal of their movies, which don’t reach a wider audience – are two of the
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most creative filmmakers at work in the world. And they’re only in their 30s. Elsewhere, the Filipino momentum keeps going strong. Adolfo Alix makes three films every year (a recent one also stars Ananda Everingham as a stranded soldier on a near-deserted island). Sherad Anthony Sanchez pushes magical realism into high gear with Jungle Love. Khavn de la Cruz – subscriber to surrealist poetry and punk-rock bravado – has made several films bordering on exhilaration and madness, and his latest, Ruined Heart, follows that proud trope with an eccentric love story between a criminal and a prostitute. Blood, sweat, tears and the two zombies of life and politics – these help keep Filipino filmmakers a truly unique force in the Southeast Asian cultural scene.
It’s hard to namecheck all the active volcanoes in Filipinio cinema, just because there are so many, and because the thriving independent film scene gushes forth new names and movies with a dizzying frequency.
John Torres’ Refrains Happen Like Revolutions in a Song.
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John Torres’ Luskas the Strange.
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or a long while, the name to note was (and still is) Grin Nugroho, the patriarch of Indonesian cinema who broke into the festival circuit in the late 1990s. Then came Joko Anwar, the offbeat crowd-pleaser, and Riri Riza, the indie star of the early 2000s who later went on to make the most commercially successful film in Indonesia, the coming-of-age drama The Rainbow Troops (2008) and its sequel The Dreamer (2009). On the edgier angle, Indonesia can boast of Edwin (he goes by one name), an alchemist of hyperdreams and everyday magic. His film Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly is a probe into the nagging question of identity and belief, while Postcards from the Zoo relies on deadpan humour as it charts the unusual life of a girl who grew up in a zoo. Along with other positive changes taking place in Indonesia, younger filmmakers are carrying on the burgeoning filmmaking
enthusiasm. While Nugroho, Anwar, Riza and Edwin continue to make movies (Garin probes into the Catholic history of his country during World War II in Sogieja, while Riri has made a film about Timor Leste in Atambua 39 Celcius), we also have new names like Ifa Isfansyah, Yosep Anggi Noen and Kamila Andini, who diversify the topics and texture of Indonesian cinema in different ways. Isfansyah made the beautiful and affecting The Dancer in 2011, about a village dancer and the looming spectre of war; then he shifted courses and last year made a martial-arts blockbuster, The Golden Stick Warrior, based on the traditional silat fighting style. Moving on to more sensitive terrain, Yosep Anggi Noen’s debut is a road movie that deals with sexual politics and adultery. More soulful is Kamila Andini, who made The Mirror Never Lies, a sensitive portrait of the life of sea nomads and their struggle to cope with the changing world.
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Yosep Anggi Noen.
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Seine riverbank.
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city of light For the travelling cinephile, the streets of Paris are still the ones to beat. by keith mundy
haggard Marlon Brando, hair in a mess, stands upon a bridge under an overhead railway. As a train clatters above, he puts his hands over his ears and howls at it. A young woman in a long white coat sashays past, shaking her head at the strange middle-aged man, then jumps over the brush of a street sweeper, flashing miniskirted legs. She arrives at the pebbled glass doors of an expensive-looking apartment building. Orchestral tango music swells and fades, bathing the scene in melancholy, fuelling the mystery. This is my favourite moment, the opening scene of Last Tango In Paris (1972), filmed on the BirHakeim Bridge, a unique doubledecker structure which carries both a Metro line and road traffic across the River Seine, connecting two beaux quartiers, the 15th and 16th
arrondissements. The midlife angst of Brando, the lithe insouciance of Maria Schneider, the dramatic Metro architecture, the grand facades of upmarket Passy, the emotive strains of Gato Barbieri’s jazz tango – all this casts a spell on a part of Paris that never features on the tourism circuit but is a site of pilgrimage for film buffs. Having previously been featured in classic French movies such as Lift To The Scaffold (1958), Zazie Dans Le Metro (1960), and, later, Fear Over The City (1975), with fearless cop Jean-Paul Belmondo riding atop a Metro carriage, the bridge most recently appeared in Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi blockbuster Inception. The Bir-Hakeim Bridge began life as the Passy Viaduct in 1905 and was renamed to commemorate a World War II battle between Free French forces and Hitler’s Afrika
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Marlon Brando Dances with Maria Schneider in Last Tango in Paris.
Miramar cinema, 1950.
Inside the Trocadero Cinema.
Parisian dresses by Jacques Fath.
In a basement salon of a Belle Epoque café, the Lumiére brothers projected the first moving pictures for a paying audience on December 28th, 1895.
Korps. Constructed in cast-iron, it presents one of the finest works of “Iron Age Paris,” that fin de siècle period when architects, most notably Gustave Eiffel, built boldly in metal throughout the city. The iron men’s most obvious achievement, the Eiffel Tower, stands a short way upriver, and the bridge gives fine views of this ultimate icon. Looking from the embankment, you see that the road bridge’s iron arches are decorated with heroic iron sculptures, but it is the colonnade of cast-iron pillars, over 200 metres long, with its nine-metre-wide walkway underneath the Metro tracks, that is the magnetic attraction for filmmakers. In Inception, apprentice dream weaver Ariadne (Ellen Page), out on a practical in Paris with her teacher Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), conjures up the footbridge which leads over the riverside avenue to Bir-Hakeim Bridge – the very spot where Maria Schneider jumped over the sweeper’s broom with such élan. They cross it and then Ariadne makes the iron colonnade materialise using mirrors. “Wait, I know this place,” exclaims Cobb, “it’s real!” She gets sharply warned about the dangers of dream-creating real places from memory. A literal dreamscape for Christopher Nolan, Paris is in truth a dream location for filmmaking
of just about any kind, a city with more architectural grandeur than any other, a staggering variety of urban vistas, highly sophisticated modes of living, and a permanent reputation for romance. That is why so many foreign film types are drawn to the French capital as a filming location. But it is of course the French themselves who make, by far, the most movies there, and most of the best ones. There’s also the small matter of the cinema having kicked off in this city, in the midst of the Grands Boulevards shopping-andentertainment district. In a basement salon of a Belle Epoque café around the corner from the Opera, the Lumière brothers projected the first moving pictures for a paying audience on December 28th, 1895, inaugurating what the French call the seventh art. At the time, if anybody had said that these shaky flickering images of dull events, such as those of workers leaving a factory, would eventually far outstrip the outlandish fantasies being enacted at the extravagantly ornate Palais Garnier opera house, or become more fun than the many can-can cabarets dotting the district, then they would have been considered mad. Amazing it is that the inventors of the art of light should be named the Lumière brothers – lumière meaning light in French – and that they should launch their art in “La Ville Lumière” – the City of Light – as Paris titles itself. Today the first screening’s site is occupied by the Hotel Scribe, a luxury hotel which honours the historic event with a restaurant called Lumière. The brothers’ invention was taken up with alacrity in France, which powered the cinema’s development until sidelined by World War I, when Hollywood took over, and France has always been the most prolific European movie-maker as well as a great innovator. That creative spirit reached a high point with the Nouvelle Vague – the New Wave – of the late 1950s and 1960s.
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“Paris is a dream location for filming, a city with more architectural grandeur than any other, a staggering variety of urban vistas, highly sophisticated modes of living, and a permanent reputation for romance.�
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The Louvre Museum and Louvre Pyramid at night.
The Champs Élysées and Arc de Triomphe, in the evening.
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The New Wave directors began with pretty small budgets and the desire to get out on the streets in “real life,” using portable equipment. Up until then, French movies never showed much of Paris, favouring studio shooting. Stupendous change came with Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (A Bout De Souffle, 1960), which didn’t use a single studio set. Instead, Godard filmed in the streets and in real interiors, with about half the action on the Champs Elysées, outside or in the business premises of the city’s “main street.” Still, the most popular place amongst Parisians for a day out, with its many first-run cinemas, terrace cafes and restaurants, the Champs Elysées’ broad sidewalk is no longer trodden by the likes of Breathless’s Patricia (Jean Seberg) or the young American vendors of the New York Herald Tribune. That job vanished long ago. The last scene, where Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), shot by the police, staggers down the middle of a street to his death, was shot in the Rue Campagne-Premiere, which
rather aptly leads to Montparnasse Cemetery. Poignantly, after her suicide in 1979, Jean Seberg was buried in this cemetery favoured by artists, where you can also find the graves of the directors Jacques Demy and Eric Rohmer, the actor Philippe Noiret, and the experimental filmmaker Man Ray, not to mention the patron saints of existentialist Paris, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, among many other famous names. The provocative imp of the New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard paid tribute to the cinematic shrine that is the Hotel Scribe by lodging special agent Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) there in his sci-fi adventure Alphaville (1965), a bleak futuristic city represented by the modern structures of 1960s Paris. And Godard made a dig at French high culture in Bande à Part (Band of Outsiders, 1964) by having Anna Karina – his wife and frequent leading lady – and her two pals run headlong through the Louvre in a race against time. This jape was reprised by Bernardo Bertolucci in
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his homage to the revolutionary May events of 1968, The Dreamers (2003), with his three young protagonists aping Godard’s in a sprint round the museum. The Grands Boulevards where cinema began became the location of great picture palaces under the entrepreneurial genius of men like Léon Gaumont and Charles Pathé, whose companies – incredibly – still exist as major forces in French cinema. The area also hosts big retail names, none bigger than Galeries Lafayette, whose flagship store is named Galeries Lafayette Haussmann in honour of the bulldosing baron who drove the boulevards through 19th-century Paris, creating the essence of the city we know today. This emporium is the great retail temple of Paris, opened in 1912 with a giant central atrium Palais Garnier.
Opera National de Paris, or Palais Garnier, the Grand Foyer.
topped with a dazzling Art Nouveau glass roof. Widely considered the most beautiful department store in Paris, it is also officially rated with the biggest turnover. In the Jean-Paul Belmondo thriller, Fear Over the City (1975), there’s a memorable chase inside the store. As gunshots ricochet across the great atrium, the sound system merrily emits the slogan “There’s always something happening at Galeries Lafayette.” Comedy takes over completely in the satire Chinese in Paris (1974), in which a Maoist army occupies France and takes Galeries Lafayette Haussmann as its headquarters, attracted by its grandeur and central location. The Chinese troops cart off all the merchandise to lessen its decadence, but in the end they are obliged to quit France after the French lead them down the evil bourgeois paths of fornication, fine-dining and
FACT FILE PARIS Air France flies non-stop daily from Bangkok to Paris. www.airfrance.com Hotel Scribe, 1 Rue Scribe, Paris 9 tel. +33 01 4471 2424 www.hotel-scribe.com Five-star hotel on the site where the first paying movie screening took place in 1895. La Fontaine Gaillon 1 Place Gaillon, Paris tel. +33 01 4742 6322 www.restaurant-la-fontainegaillon.com Housed in a 17th-century mansion, Gerard Depardieu’s elegant restaurant serves traditional French cuisine and fine wines from the actor’s own vineyards. Louvre Museum Paris 1; tel. +33 01 4020 5317 www.louvre.fr Open Mon, Thur, Sat, Sun, 9am6pm; Wed, Fri, 9am-9.45pm. The world’s largest and most visited art museum. Cinematheque Francaise 51 Rue de Bercy, Paris 12 tel. +33 01 7119 3333, www.cinematheque.fr Mon-Sat noon-7pm, Sun 10am-8pm Cinema archive, programmes of French and world cinema, plus a superb museum. Salle Wagram 39 Avenue de Wagram, Paris 17 tel. +33 01 5805 5605; www.sallewagram.com. A mythic event hall with the oldest pedigree in Paris.
Notre Dame de Paris.
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fashion-wearing. The great irony is that today the biggest foreign shoppers at Galeries Lafayette Haussmann are the Chinese, surpassing the Americans and the Japanese, and carting off millions of euros of luxury goods – after paying for them, of course. Now when the Chinese amass at the plateglass portals, the store’s Chinesespeaking greeters present them with welcome packages. Luxury shoppers with the fattest wallets head south from the Grands Boulevards along the Rue de la Paix to the Place Vendome area with its glittering jewellery stores and chic couture houses, plus the Hotel Ritz. Strongly featured in three Audrey Hepburn movies, the Ritz is a byword for luxury, about to re-open after a radical two-year renovation. “Putting on the Ritz” should soon have a new meaning. At the centre
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of the square is a 44-metre-high column, modelled on Trajan’s Column in Rome, whose stone core is encased in the bronze of cannons captured by Napoleon at the Battle of Austerlitz, fashioned into a spiral bas-relief of martial scenes. Now just an intriguing landmark, in the 19th century the column aroused fierce passions, pulled down by one government, rebuilt by another, its Napoleon statue smashed, then recast. The artist Courbet wondered why the Rue de la Paix – Peace Street – led to a celebration of war. Inevitably, filmmakers have found rich pickings here, especially for jewellery-heist movies, the two classics being Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955) and Jean-Pierre Melville’s The Red Circle (1970). A masterpiece of film noir, Rififi has a 30-minute wordless robbery sequence set in the jewellers Mappin & Webb,
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A waiter at a cafe in Le Marais.
Les Philosophes Brasserie, Rue Vieille du Temple, Marais Quarter.
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premises now used by the jeweller and watchmaker Poiray. A highpoint of Melville’s gangster-movie career, with one of Alain Delon’s best mobster portrayals, The Red Circle features the Mauboussin store at 20 Place Vendome. In the 1998 film Place Vendome, Catherine Deneuve stars as an alcoholic gem dealer with the premises of the leading jeweller Chaumet, founded in 1780, as a main location. Far greater treasures, however, are found further on down the street at that peerless running track, the Louvre. Originally the immense royal palace at Paris’s heart, the Louvre has served as an art museum for two centuries. The world’s greatest collection of art arranged in 60,600 square metres of space, its works span 4,500 years of art history, with about 35,000 on display at any given time. The museum’s splendour and vast extent is a gift to moviemakers, if they can get permission to shoot. The most famous instance of recent times was for The Da Vinci Code (2006), whose focal event is the murder of the museum’s curator in the Grand Gallery, the Louvre’s longest hall, brimming with Italian renaissance masterpieces. Truth to tell, if you like surprises and puzzles, savage slaughter and amazing characters, you’re much better off to look at the pictures in the Louvre than to watch that movie. A great Paris experience is to walk – no, don’t run – the 120 metres of the 19thcentury French painting gallery past a cavalcade of canvases, some as big as a multiplex screen, depicting great and noble, shocking and terrifying, events. Survivors of a shipwreck are lashed by gigantic waves in Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19), Napoleon gives succour to the dying in Gros’s Battlefield of Eylau (1807), the heroic Spartans prepare to lay down their lives in David’s Leonidas at Thermopylae (1814), Napoleon crowns himself emperor in David’s The Coronation of Napoleon (1807). The Dreamers’ Louvre running scene is sparked by cinephilia, a love
which at the start takes the three “dreamers” to the Cinematheque Francaise, the state-funded repertory cinema and film archive then located in the Palais de Chaillot at Trocadero. There, during a demo against the government’s firing of the head of the Cinémathèque, Henri Langlois – the first rumblings of 1968’s great revolt – the American Matthew falls in with the Parisian siblings, Isabelle and Théo, who are bent on matching their lives to the movies they adore. Today the Cinematheque is housed in a Frank Gehry-designed facility at Bercy in eastern Paris, a low-key location compared to the Palais de Chaillot, a jewel of Art Deco architecture that rises above the River Seine with an esplanade looking across to the Eiffel Tower. The most affecting film of this dramatic place has to be, unfortunately, the newsreel of Hitler gloating after the Nazi capture of Paris in 1940. Walk from Trocadero straight up the posh Avenue Kléber to the Arc de Triomphe, and across into the equally upmarket Avenue de Wagram, and you’ll soon be at the Salle Wagram. Four decades on from Last Tango, the old-fashioned dancehall where Paul (Brando) and Jeanne (Schneider) disrupt the tango competition at the movie’s climax still exists, as shiny as ever after a recent renovation. The Salle Wagram calls itself the last great venue of the gay old “Vie Parisienne,” incarnating “the tastes, desires…the anguish, pains and dreams of Parisians….Its walls whisper their history to the wind and resound with Parisian footsteps, their dancing, their laughter, their art of living.” Rentable for all kinds of events, the chandelier-hung hall is surely happiest when it’s being foxtrotted by ladies in chiffon and gents in tails, and definitely without a mooning Marlon Brando. Take your partner for a last whirl, and keep your pants on.
photo: ©corbis / profile
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Cinema Cities The world’s three biggest movie industries are the USA’s, based in Los Angeles; India’s, in Mumbai; and Nigeria’s, in Lagos – three burgeoning megacities on three different continents, with widely divergent stories to tell.
Lagos – Nollywood
Los Angeles - Hollywood
Los Angeles calls itself the entertainment capital of the world, and who can argue? A gigantic metropolitis with 18 million inhabitants, it puts out an awful lot of movies, TV shows and music recordings. On the other hand, only 3.8% of its employees work in the arts, design, entertainment, sports and media fields. There’s a bit of everything here. As the architect Frank Lloyd Wright said, “Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.” Well, why else would the airport be called LAX? In the city with a huge “HOLLYWOOD” sign shouting from the scrubland of its Hollywood Hills, the movies are the signature industry, and the studios the prime tourist attraction, with many tours on offer. As one promoter puts it: “Learn behind-the-scenes facts, view cool props and sets – and possibly get a glimpse of a celebrity!” That “possibly” is a rare bit of truth in make-believe land, because you’re much more likely to bump into a Woody Woodpecker figure than Leonardo DiCaprio. For serious students of Hollywood, however, the Warner Brothers VIP small-group tour gets high ratings.
Mumbai – Bollywood
Mumbai is the financial, commercial and entertainment capital of India, the hub of the world’s biggest movie industry (in terms of ticket sales and number of films made, if not of overall revenue), one of the world's top business centres by transaction value, and one of the world’s greatest pits of poverty. With 20 million people living in high density, a goodly proportion are slumdogs, as the Oscar-draped movie Slumdog Millionaire (2008) dubbed the dwellers of Mumbai’s grungiest housing. There are actually slum tours for tourists, but perhaps more magnetic are the tours of Bollywood studios. Ever since Bombay became Mumbai, the Bollywood tag has looked a bit odd, and it’s also been misunderstood as meaning all of Indian cinema when, correctly speaking, it is the Hindi-language film industry of Mumbai. Bollywood’s major facility, the 208 hectares of Filmcity, sprawls in the suburb of Goregaon, where hundreds of movies are shot every year. Tours take visitors through backlots and onto elaborate sets, give glimpses of live filming, and reveal the costume gallery’s treasures. For complete immersion, foreigners can sign on as extras, but expect long hours, lots of waiting, and a pittance for pay. To get an idea of what the stars are paid, drive through the suburb of Bandra and goggle at their palatial homes.
The commercial capital of Nigeria, Lagos 181 is a monster, Africa’s largest city sprawling around a lagoon and across its islands – hence the Portuguese name for lakes it acquired in the 15th century. The colonial capital of the British, Lagos today has about 21 million inhabitants, densely housed. In a city of startling inequality, fishermen in pirogues paddle past skyscrapers, and slums sprawl under flyovers. Long reported as an urban nightmare, Lagos has lately gained much improved security and public transport, but it’s hardly a tourism hotspot, more a place for the keen student of congested megacities – and of the world’s third biggest movie industry, after Hollywood and Bollywood. Inevitably dubbed “Nollywood” when it took off in the 1990s, the industry now provides the lion’s share of movies to Sub-Saharan Africa. Lagos is its hub, but you won’t find any grand studios, and certainly no tours. Nollywood makes a virtue out of the simple and cheap, using lots of location shooting, off-the-shelf video editing equipment and direct-to-DVD distribution, and specialises in voodoo horror flicks. About 30 new titles arrive weekly at Lagos's giant open-air markets, where banners with gaudy portraits of movie stars flap above the intense hubbub.