Ok, so I'm trying to change this: app/ - lib.py - models.py - blah.py Into this: app/ - __init__.py - lib.py - models/ - __init__.py - user.py - account.py - banana.py - blah.py And still be able to import my models using from app.models import User rather than having to change it to from app.models.user import User all over the place. Basically, I want everything to treat the package as a single module, but be able to navigate the code in separate files for development ease. The reason I can't do something like add for file in __all__: from file import * into init.py is I have circular references between the model files. A fix I don't want is to import those models from within the functions that use them. But that's super ugly. Let me give you an example: user.py ... from app.models import Banana ... banana.py ... from app.models import User ... I wrote a quick pre-processing script that grabs all the files, re-writes them to put imports at the top, and puts it into models.py, but that's hardly an improvement, since now my stack traces don't show the line number I actually need to change. Any ideas? I always though init was probably magical but now that I dig into it, I can't find anything that lets me provide myself this really simple convenience.