AGN Unveils “ON-SCREEN” Magazine Ahead Of The AGN International Festival In Maimi, USA.

The Magazine.

The National President of the Actors Guild of Nigeria, AGN, Dr. Ejezie Emeka Rollas Rollas has said that the Nollywood of his dreams is that which would not be run like football business in Nigeria when the local football was doing very well and all of a sudden, people began to go abroad and the international football began to boom.

This he opined as the AGN unveiled what it called, “ON-SCREEN” Magazine, which is a magazine for actors, but the main magazine would be unveiled in Miami during the AGN International Festival holding in Maimi, USA. 

The On-Screen would be an online magazine talking mainly about actors in Nigeria, trying to create visual awareness for actors especially for those who had worked with nothing to show for their efforts which is as a result of lack of branding amongst ourselves for our craft, nationally and internationally.

He said that the AGN International Festival will expose Nigerian actors to international casting agencies abroad, we don’t have to sit in Nigerian and wait for them to come to us, we will just end up like that Nigerian football, we must take the bull by its horn by going to the main casting agencies in America as AGN and this we must do during my time as National President.

Could you believe that there were some movies shoots that Nigerian actors were supposed to be part of, but were not part of, instead, the roles were given to other blacks from other African countries without Nigeria represented. The only way the industry will improve the welfare of an actor in terms of paying good renumeration is when you are involved in a production that has big budget in terms of a company coming to Nigeria to produce. A movie can be produced in American soil and some actors would be taken from here to feature in such production., then when you finish such a production, the kind of money of money you’ll bring from there will do so much for you as an actor.

What we have presently are people acting as go-between actors and people who hire them and like I said whilst speaking, anybody who knows you very well will never increase your fee. AGN is advocating for us to go sell ourselves out there by taking the war to their doorsteps.

The event in Maimi will assemble casting directors, members of the screen actors guild of America for different workshops. We’re talking about Artificial Intelligence, AI because hardly any actor in Nigeria with the knowledge of Artificial Intelligence and I bet you, by 2030, we’ll be struggling to know what AI is. So, it’s good for us to be in on time to know about these things as actors, put them together and then, come back here to make it help our industry.

That is the essence of AGN International Festival, we will do it next year until we see Nigerian actors employed in bigger projects outside our shores, not just coming to Nigeria to film and at the end of the day, you finish shooting all those films in quote and still remain where you are, then an actor is struggling to buy car in Nigeria.

Enough of this living in pretense and open ourselves to people out there for people to see what we are doing and for people to understand that this is the Actors Guild of Nigeria and we are the largest association in the culture sector in Africa. 

It was indeed a night of glitz and glamour at the pre event cocktail for the AGN International Festival coming up in Miami Florida USA from 16th to 18th November 2023 as the AGN unveiled the cover of AGN online magazine ON SCREEN with screen diva Monalisa Chinda who is the immediate past Director of Communications as cover lady. 

In attendance at the cocktail night was Julie McKay, Public Affairs Officer of the US Consulate and her husband with the CEO of AFRIF, Chioma Ude present. Others were, the AGN Director of Communications, Kate Henshew, Chief of Staff, Ifeoma Okeke, Steve Eboh, Osita Iheme, Chinedu Ikedieze, Pascaline Alex, Ronnie Dikko, Chidi Ihezie-Okafor, Victor Osuagwu, Bovi, Fred Amata, Jennifer Eliogu, Keppy Ekpeyong and a host of others including journalists.