The National Film and Video Censors Board (NFVCB) has said the board plans to create a digital archive for films it has approved and classified.
The Executive Director/ Chief Executive Officer, Dr Shaibu Husseini, disclosed in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Monday in Abuja.
The disclosure came as Nigeria joins the rest of the world to commemorate the 2025 World Day for Audio-visual Heritage (WDAH) marked annually on Oct. 27, with the theme, “Your Window to the World”.
The NFVCB helmsman said that besides film censorship and classification, the board was a repository of such films.
According to him, in line with realities of the digital age, the nation’s motion picture industry regulatory body is working toward creating a digital archive to preserve all approved films.
“When I was appointed by his Excellency, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu in January of 2024, the very first thing that I said we must begin to do is how to archive this films properly.
“There have been some archival efforts in the past, but the world has moved from that analogue era to the digital era.
“It is time for us to begin to digitise these works and put them in a format that will make them easily retrievable.
“At the moment, they are in a format where you can access them, we have downloaded some of the VHS into CDs/VCDs.
“Now we need to turn the CDs and VCDs into formats that you can access them by just getting them via the link or tapping on the computer,” he said.
According to Husseini, the board has about 280,000 films ready for migration to the proposed digital archive.
He said those titles would be preserved and stored in formats that would make them accessible in consonant with the tech and digital age.
“If you want to explore them, beyond seeing the titles then you have to go and get the rights from the right owners because we do not have the rights to the films.
“We have submitted the proposal, and it has been approved by our minister and even at the higher level because it is expensive to digitise them.
“As soon as the 2025 budget is released, we will start the process of digitising them to put them in the right format,” Husseini said.
NAN reports that WDAH was Declared by UNESCO in 2005 to raise awareness of the significance and the preservation of audio-visual documents, including films, sound and video recordings, radio and television programmes.
As Nigeria marks the day, its vibrate film industry, popularly known as Nollywood, constitutes a significant part of its audio-visual heritage.
Acclaimed to be the second-largest in the world by output, the Nigerian motion picture industry has evolved over the past three decades into a global creative force with an estimated 2,500 film output annually.
Originating from the celluloid, VHS and CD/DVD era, the industry has embraced digital distribution through platforms like Netflix and YouTube and covering various genres of storytelling with global appeal.
However, there is a need to preserve these critical national assets, especially the classic films of the analogue era.
