The association, led by the president, Jide Kosoko, said they were at the Lagos Office of the Board to rob minds with the director general and get clarifications on the new guidelines.

The director general took the members down memory lane on what informed the new policy. Kosoko in his response noted they were more informed now and assured the helmsman of the Board of their willingness to fully embrace it.

It would be recalled that despite the initial outcry that greeted the distribution framework, the Board continued to garner support while it marches on in preaching the new framework to stakeholders in the various zones in the country. Apart from the Chairman Senate Committee on Information, Tafaru Wada, who first hinted that they were behind the guidelines, the Federation of International Property Owners (FIPO), Association of Movie Producers, (AMP), Actors Guild of Nigeria (AGN), Abuja Chapter, Motion Pictures Practitioners Council of Nigeria (MOPPICON) and various other guilds in the movie industry, have all hailed the framework.

Mba had earlier commended the association for resorting to getting clarification from the Board on the issue which most of their peers never thought of, stressing that the Board is willing to assist the association in their plans to become part of the new framework.

Kosoko said: "ANTP agrees with most of the things in the framework, and we will completely embrace any idea that will move the industry forward". According to him, the ANTP has for long known that marketing has been the bane of the industry – the reason why we have attempted to intervene in the not too distant past, especially in improving production standards.

Kosoko disagreed with one of the members of the association who appealed to the director general to consider them as a distributor. Kosoko rather reminded his colleague that they control 50 percent of the industry, and that he would personally discuss concession plans for ANTP to emerge as a formidable distributor.

The grouse of ANTP, Kosoko continued is that the Board is not giving the association the needed recognition as pioneers in the industry who started from stage productions to celluloid, colour reversal etc. He said there had been instances where the Board had excluded them in the past by not inviting them to discuss sensitive issues that affect them (ANTP) with over 20, 000 members. He said the marketers who are crying foul now, came into an existing industry and started by first recording their (ANTP’s) works from television and commercializing it.

The director general observed that the distribution framework is a process, and not a policy, hence it is subject to change and modification as long as such change does not take away the objective and philosophy of the framework.

He told the association that the Board has already acceded to the request of stakeholders to include regional distributors as capable of censoring films along with national distributors.

He also assured them that the Board is working diligently to assuage some of the requirements to be met by entering into discussions with some banks and insurance firms to revisit the N50 million bond. He also noted that distributors would also benefit from a tax holiday from the Inland Revenue Board Service.