"The first in-depth study of the British Colonial Film Unit (CFU), it provides a meticulously researched survey of a cinema corps that has been largely neglected by historians of British film. . . . Films for the Colonies provides a sturdy foundation for future studies of the CFU, one that scholars can build upon to shed further light on the unit’s rich, underexplored body of surviving films."
"This book shows the depth of available material and the kinds of media histories that can be researched and written based on that material."
"Films for the Colonies will prove essential reading for the growing community of scholars interested in the history of media in European colonies. . . . this is an attractively packaged, absorbingly written history of a fascinating subject. It will prove equally valuable to scholars interested in British film history, the global history of film, or the end of the Empire."
"This essential book, while very aware of race, seems to navigate an internal complexity between making visible the colonized subjects and the colonial agents outside the frame, and a disquiet in articulating the very violence of the racial representations within."
“It is deliciously ironic that an institution created to administer an empire through film should become the exemplary case of imperial cinema’s dissolution. Tom Rice’s account, which has the potential to be a touchstone for institutional and imperial histories, shows us how the British Colonial Film Unit was precisely such an organization.”—Priya Jaikumar, author of Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space and Cinema at the End of Empire
“Brings to light a treasure trove of archival sources and films in a synthetic perspective that clarifies lingering mysteries regarding the organization of the British colonial film units. This remarkable book adds significant complexity to our understanding of government-sponsored documentary cinema.”—Peter J. Bloom, author of French Colonial Documentary: Mythologies of Humanitarianism
