Limited by 1,600 linguistic dialects and a penchant for long family- and legend-based sagas, and aimed at often open-air village projection, India’s films remained unexportable until the Bengali Apu Trilogy. From the most prolific filmmakers in the world, even today Bollywood productions are attended abroad mainly by national expats. Much of the same applies to the two-decade phenomenon of rapid rampant output from Nigeria’s capital Lagos, already third in brute numbers behind India and the United States and now the subject of Nollywood Babylon.

Not the exposé one might expect from the play on Kenneth Anger’s scandal book Hollywood Babylon and its sequel, the seventy-four-minute documentary was presented, and discussed afterwards at the first of five Museum of Modern Art showings, by Samir Mallal, co-director, -writer and –photographer with Ben Addelman. Mallal indicated that the project was initially conceived as a character study of Nigerian director Lancelot Oduwa Imasuen, whose hundred-thirty-something-th film had attracted him at a 2006 Montreal festival. But the larger story of Nollywood came to the fore, not narrated but, instead, following around the Lagos filmmaker for a year, as he and others comment in general while, a ball-of-fire thirty-seven, he makes his hundred-fifty-seventh, Bent Arrows, followed two weeks later by a next one.

This Canadian-Nigerian production is as nervous jumping around as its prolific director-subject-cicerone, to mixed results. With its African-accented English speakers subtitled distractingly against the better judgment of Mallal, the whole is neither enough of character study nor of cinema dissection and history.

The camera makes points in views of the continent’s most populous nation’s capital, Lagos, hot, humid, chaotic, unsanitary, overstuffed with traffic, people and slums, filled with markets and electronics stalls selling and renting videos and DVDs for home or community viewing of the two-and-a-half-thousand domestic under-$10,000 cheapos churned out annually. The bottom having dropped out of the naira and the economy in ‘80s civil war, coups, corruption, and inefficient military control, all but three movie houses folded in the midst of poverty and civilian fears.

British conquerors had fostered the imperial white master image after they came a century ago, in b&w’s like Palaver (1928) and, despite Paul Robeson’s presence, Sanders of the River aka Bosambo (1935). But some twenty years after independence in 1960, the home cinema industry began to “become the voice of Africa, the answer to CNN,” with works such as Death of a Black President (1983) and especially its first blockbuster, Living in Bondage (1992).

Posters in shops and streets, and brief clips from low-quality films, introduce a confusing number of provocative, though not necessarily sexual, titles. Actor Bob-Manuel Odokwu and others observe that the screen feeds poverty’s dream of sudden wealth. Other commentators point to themes from traditional beliefs, “juju, voodoo, magic behind closed doors.” While no one here wants to go to Hollywood, because “it’s white, you know,” hopeful hundreds turn out to audition for parts as millionaires, desperate housewives, prostitutes or inept gangsters.

Mixed in, too, between scenes of Imasuen on the job, are the calm but cryptic remarks of old-line poet Odia Ofeimon, one of those who see a loss of truth and tradition in the rush to newfangledness.

Equally full of possibilities is the strong evangelical tide in the country, drawing in the disenfranchised with an emotional appeal to spiritual riches. The connection here is Helen Ukpabio, minister to a congregation of fifty thousand and, “in this to spread my message,” among the most successful filmmakers, through Liberty Films depicting Christian miracle defeating diabolic magic.

Film as evangelism, film as hope, film as adventurous escape or forgetfulness from misery, film as national expression -- Nollywood Babylon teases, for its themes are interesting but, too many of them brought up, they do not get the incisive treatment each deserves.

(Released by Lorber HT Digital; not rated by MPAA.)