PROGRAMS AND EVENTS

U.S. Embassy-Funded Nigerian Movie Wins 2008 Zuma Award

Date: May 8, 2009
Venue: Abuja

Click here to view the full sized Award certificate

“Tsintsiya” (The Broom), a Hausa movie adaptation of the 1950s classic musical West Side Story has won the 2008 Zuma Award for best film on social issues.  Tsintsiya producer, Hamisu Lamido Iyan-Tama received the award presented by an official of the Federal Ministry of Information and Communications at the closing ceremony of the biennial Zuma Film Festival held at the NICON Luxury Hotel, Abuja on May 8th.

Professor Jude Akudinobi, Chairman of the jury and a teacher of Black Studies at the University of California in Santa Barbara, described the 2008 exercise as challenging and rewarding.  He said it opened up various angles to engage the diverse and creative energies that feed into the Nigerian film industry known as “Nollywood.”  He also said that the film festival showed quite clearly the potential and challenge of the next frontier of Nigerian filmmaking, especially the industry's relationship with the global cinema cultures given this year’s festival theme, “Film Without Boarders.”

Tsintsiya is the classic story of love conquering adversity.  The story plot is anchored on the similarities between New York in the 1950s, and contemporary Kano Nigeria, a melting pot where industry, commerce, agriculture, creativity, and a vibrant economy has been destroyed by sectarian violence, ethnic suspicions and distrust of one another.

The movie celebrates Nigeria’s rich ethnic, cultural and religious influences as great strength to the nation, much as the broom in the classic Hausa metaphor is strengthened by the binding together of its individual strands.