Book excerpt: This is the fully comprehensive account of film production in the Third World. Although they are usually ignored or marginalized in histories of "world cinema." Third World countries now produce well over half of the world's films. Armes places this huge output in a wider context, examining the forces of tradition and colonialism that have shaped the Third World. In addition to charting filmic developments too little known in Europe and the United States, the book calls into question many of the assumptions that shape conventional film history. It stresses the role of distribution in defining and limiting production, queries simplistic notions of independent "national cinemas," and points to the need to take social and economic factors into account when considering authorship in cinema. Above all, the book celebrates the achievements of a mass of largely unknown film makes who, in difficult circumstances, have distinctively expanded our definitions of the art of cinema.