Oil theft has become big business in Nigeria, costing oil companies more than $7 billion per year while polluting coastal farmlands and fisheries -- wrecking the lives and livelihoods of local residents. VICE met with oil thieves who refine and sell oil in West Africa, and followed one farmer's attempt to sue a foreign oil company for poisoning his land.
Nigeria suffers oil spills equivalent to the 1989 Exxon-Valdez disaster - which impacted thousands of kilometres of shoreline - every single year. The result: a devastated environment, water contaminated with crude oil, and local populations no longer able to support themselves through fishing and farming. Anger is slowly but surely gaining ground.
A documentary on oil sabotage on the Niger Delta and its effects on the community. It seemed peace was to come to the Niger Delta but the fighting and oil sabotage has resumed. A powerful report filmed before the amnesty but with many participants sceptical the world remains as pertinent as ever.
Nigeria has the biggest oil reserves in Africa but who’s cashing in? Nigeria is Africa’s top oil producer and has its biggest economy. But it’s also coping with crushing levels of poverty. So where does all that oil money go?
Hidden deep in the mangrove swamps of the Niger Delta lie hundreds of illegal refineries, “cooking spots”. It’s the stronghold of hostage takers and armed groups. For some ten years these men have been spreading terror in the region. Few cameras have been able to penetrate the closed worlds of these oil thieves.
The terrorist group Boko Haram is responsible for thousands of deaths in Nigeria. In 2016 former Navy SEAL and VICE correspondent Kaj Larsen traveled to Nigeria to document the consequences of the hunting Boko Haram militants by the government on the lives of the people caught in the middle of the fight.
Bertrand Monnet, a French academic and filmmaker, has been travelling to piracy hot spots around the coast of Africa. In an extraordinary and very tense series of encounters, he came to face to face with heavily armed pirate gangs operating in and around the Niger Delta, where Nigeria's huge offshore oil industry offers rich ransom pickings.
Of all the casualties of the post-war alliance between the Nigerian military state and big oil, the Ogoni people were arguably amongst the worst hit. With the full blessing of the Nigerian government, the Royal Dutch Shell oil company was authorised to explore and extract oil from Ogoniland, which quickly became a living nightmare for the Ogoni people.
With the second highest death-toll of all African conflicts, the Nigerian Civil War (also known as the Biafran War) claimed in three years the lives of over 100,000 soldiers and an estimated 2 million civilians, as the Nigerian government fought to prevent the secession of the self-proclaimed Republic of Biafra.
Beginning with the filmmaker’s initial trip to document the building of a library in a remote village, Sweet Crude is a journey of multilayered revelation and ever-deepening questions. Set against a stunning backdrop of Niger Delta footage, the film gives voice to the region’s complex mix of stakeholders and invites the audience to learn the deeper story.
A fiction film telling the story of two British women and their extraordinary journey deep into the hinterland of the Niger Delta - a beautiful but highly dangerous region of Nigeria. There, they become embroiled in a hostage negotiation situation, which soon turns into a nightmare.
When the Ogoni people protested the pollution caused by the oil industry operating in their lands, they were met with brutality. Nigeria's military government attracted international condemnation for its oppression. Villages were destroyed, their inhabitants indiscriminately killed, and their leader imprisoned and then executed - all because of oil.
A report from the British "This Modern Age" series about reforms in the British colony of Nigeria released in 1948. Part of Colonial Film - Moving Images of the British Empire and held by the BFI, it depicted "the problems" that had to be faced before Nigeria could "hope to become an independent nation within the Commonwealth".
"Three students from different corners of Nigeria come to Ibadan University. The film traces back each of their journeys to the university. Scenes of their homes give a new impression of an old country, and how a modern network of communications - all dependent on oil and petrol - has opened up what was not so long ago inaccessible territory."
Huntley Film Archives' collection on Nigeria includes over a hundred of short documentaries and footage (many of them accessible online) shot in Nigeria from the 20's to the 70's, covering a wide variety of topics, from ethnographic to the daily life in the city or in the rural areas, education, health, work, conflicts and the independence.