Near to one billion people call slums their home, making it a reasonable claim to describe our world as a ’planet of slums.’ But how has this hard and unyielding way of life been depicted on screen? From Jacob Riis’ How The Other Half Lives (1890) to Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008), Igor Krstic outlines a transnational history of films that either document or fictionalise the favelas, shantytowns, barrios poulares or chawls of our ’planet of slums’, exploring the way accelerated urbanisation has intersected with an increasingly interconnected global film culture.