ABSTRACT:

Since Living in Bondage in 1992, Nigeria‟s Nollywood, like such other social institutions as education, government and religion, has continued to generate knowledge and popular discourses about issues and social groups in the country. Youth is one social group that the Nigerian filmmakers have focussed on in recent times. Since discourses in any social formation are never value-free and are social constructs that mingle with power, crucial questions need to be asked regarding the whys and wherefores of Nollywood‟s popular discourses of youth, forms of knowledge, meaning, modes of realization and implications of the images of youth the Nigerian video film industry is generating and putting out. To achieve this, the paper uses critical discourse analysis to analyse a sample of three feature Nigerian films starring Osita Iheme and Chinedu Ikedieze. The aim is to direct attention to some of the ways that the films as popular discourses and social imaginations of youth help to perpetuate negative images of youth as well as to highlight their complicity in the demonization and subordination of youth in the Nigerian society