Before we see anything, we hear the ripping cough of an electric generator as it leaps into action. In a flash, the iconic National Arts Theatre stands illuminated against the night sky left pitch black by a chronic power outage. The generator’s whir dissolves into the zipping two-stroke engine of an okada motorcycle taxi, anticipating the visual dissolve that, moments after, provides the image. Its driver, lit by the headlights, opens up the throttle and weaves away through dense Lagos traffic. The sound of laboured breathing bridges the series of shots before we see its source; a man walks toward the camera with the limp body of a woman in his arms. The identity of these characters is withheld while the disjunctive editing skips across time and space, in effect, refusing to ground viewers. These shots comprise the opening sequence of Andy Amadi Okoroafor’s Relentless (2010). We struggle to gain our bearings, and in this specific sense, the sequence makes full use of the darkness that regularly engulfs Lagos given its faltering electrical grid, while the soundtrack lends the aura of a bustling city.

Relentless stands out as an example of growing diversification in Nollywood, and the rise of a so-called New Nollywood that seeks to break into the vetting institutions and distribution circuits of ‘global’ cinema, to meet what industry insiders imagine to be ‘global standards’. Some New Nollywood filmmakers, in a strategy meant to garner recognition, have consciously adopted longstanding genre conventions as a token of cinematic expertise and fluency that this chapter examines as a practice of transnationalism. Notably, this chapter adopts a transnational framework to denote the scale of industry practices that operate ‘above the level of the national but below the level of the global’ (Durovicova and Newman 2010), while it also deploys the term ‘global’ to capture the way that word has come to broadly connote ‘the social relations that selectively constitute global society’ and crucially, ‘the statuses and ranks that it comprises’ (Ferguson 2006). This distinction has bearing, also, on matters of representation as the evolution of New Nollywood genre films in turn modulates the representation of Lagos, presenting a city with a reputation for insecurity and crime through the lens of transnational genre frameworks that can generate global legibility (Subirós 2001, Agbola 1997).