Available From UC Press

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 organizations, and private corporations to link capitalist conceptions of economic growth to improved quality of life. Development films made this link beautifully compelling, blending elements from ethnography and socially committed leftist film traditions to create indelible narratives of underdevelopment and modernization. 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 organizations they worked for and the actors in their films.

Molly Geidel is Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College and author of Peace Corps Fantasies: How Development Shaped the Global Sixties.

"Who decided that Latin America needed saving—and what stories sold that idea to the world? Molly Geidel traces how leftist filmmakers became unwitting architects of empire, crafting films that romanticized progress while justifying extraction, militarism, and indigenous erasure. This gripping excavation of Cold War cinema, politics, and the development imaginary that shaped hemispheric consensus shows that Latin America wasn't just developed—it was directed."—Pooja Rangan, author of Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary

"The forgotten genre of the development film was generated by all the energies poured into the international development efforts of the twentieth century. This sharp and engaging book does more than recover these films; it also shows how their production and reception mirrored the contested ambitions, limits, and failures of larger development agendas."—David Ekbladh, author of Plowshares into Swords: Weaponized Knowledge, Liberal Order, and the League of Nations

"Based on impressive primary research, this historically comprehensive, erudite, and accessibly written book—the first extended treatment of this body of films—raises important questions about development as both a political and an audiovisual project. A valuable contribution to the study of Latin American, ethnographic, and useful cinema, as well as to cultural studies writ large."—Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky, author of The Process Genre: Cinema and the Aesthetic of Labor