The Development Film in the Americas

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by Molly Geidel

Type: Stories
Subject: Genre > Documentary
Keywords: documentary, Latin America
Publishing date: 2025 (October 28, 2025) (Upcoming)
Publisher: University of California Press
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 328 pages
6 x 9 inches (15.5 x 23 cm)

ISBN

978-0-520-41648-2

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Book Presentation:
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.

About the Author:
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.

See the publisher website: University of California Press

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