The Development Film in the Americas

In this book, Molly Geidel traces the rise and fall of the development film, an overlooked film genre that circulated widely in the Americas from the 1940s through the 1970s.

Development films, often short documentaries, were made at the behest of state agencies, global governance organisations, and private corporations to link capitalist conceptions of economic growth to improved quality of life. These films made this link beautifully compelling, blending elements from ethnography and socially committed leftist film traditions to create indelible narratives of underdevelopment and modernisation.

The Development Film in the Americas tells the story of these films and the hemispheric cohort of filmmakers who crafted them, chronicling the filmmakers' fraught relationships with both the organisations they worked for and the actors in their films.