Channel 5’s Jose Sanchez wins CBU regional Award

Great Belize Productions/Channel Five is known for superior quality programming at home and also in the region, evidenced by the number of honors it has won over the years in the annual Caribbean Broadcasting Union (CBU) awards. News features by various reporters are submitted to the CBU under various categories to compete against member stations from across the Caribbean. News Five’s Jose Sanchez finished first in the area of education and culture for the 2009 awards with a feature he and cameraman, Chris Mangar, did back in July of 2008, when they took to the streets to find out more on an interesting shift by movie enthusiasts. Sanchez says that it was his curiosity about the African movie industry that motivated him to do the award winning piece entitled Nollywood.
Jose Sanchez, C.B.U. Award Winner

“As you know Hollywood, that’s where most movies are made and in India, it is known as Bollywood, the other largest metropolis. However, not many people know about a third area where movies are made which is a billion dollar industry and its called Nollywood—which are made between Nigeria and other countries. The reason that I did a story on it is that I am a movie buff. I like going to the stores and find the latest Hollywood movies. And a store that I normally frequent on Albert Street when I went in there one day, there were barely any movies from Hollywood, they were all African made movies. I had a curiosity, I wanted to know why these movies are being sold. I see people on the street men and women walking around with these Nigerian made movies and I realize that there is a cultural change in what we like and appreciate. So it started as a curiosity but it became a learning process as it says a lot about who we are. They got to see people just like them, they got to see people of color on the big screen problem, how they solve family problems, relationship problems and normally with the Hollywood movies its normally a white genre and you can’t necessarily compare yourself to that but you can see yourself on the characters on the screen. And that’s what I got from it.”