ABSTRACT
The wide-ranging and intrinsically public nature of development means that getting to grips with broader, more popular understandings of the concept is critical to improving the way development policies are conceived, debated, implemented and assessed. Partly for this reason, we made a case in an article entitled “The Fiction of Development” that novels ought to be considered potentially valuable sources of information about development, since they both supplement and challenge more familiar forms of academic or policy knowledge, and may also qualify or even overtly challenge mainstream thinking about knowledge authority (Lewis et al., 2008; reproduced as chapter 2 of this volume). In that paper, we limited our discussion to literary fiction, but we recognised that other forms of fictional representation, such as films and plays, also constituted important communicative mediums for addressing key themes in development. Building on some of the insights of our earlier article – and as promised in one of its footnotes – this chapter extends our arguments to the interface between cinema and development. 2
