Detropia

Detropia (2012)

Detroit’s story has encapsulated the iconic narrative of America over the last century – the Great Migration of African Americans escaping Jim Crow; the rise of manufacturing and the middle class; the love affair with automobiles; the flowering of the American dream; and now… the collapse of the economy and the fading American mythos.

Date of release
2012-09-07
TMDB
6.7 / 10 (36)
Runtime
1h 33m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Rachel Grady, Heidi Ewing

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 1 · Nominations: 0. Including: Sundance Editing Award Documentary

Detropia is a 2012 American documentary film, directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, about the city of Detroit, Michigan. It focuses on the decline of the economy of Detroit due to long-term changes in the automobile industry, and the effects that the decline has had on the city's residents and infrastructure.

Background

Directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady are the founders of Loki Films, a production company that specializes in documentaries. By 2008, they had made several successful documentaries, including The Boys of Baraka and Jesus Camp. Ewing, who grew up in the Detroit suburb of Farmington Hills, described the genesis of the Detropia project in a 2012 Q&A interview:

...my co-director and I, Rachel, started talking about the city of Detroit in late 2008, because I would return home and things really seemed to be getting worse and worse. And it was already bad when I grew up there in the 80s. So to see the crisis sort of spread out further and further into the suburbs and a lot of people I knew were leaving.

The film received funding from several sources, particularly the Ford Foundation and the Independent Television Service.

Ewing elaborated further on the evolution of their filmmaking process in a HuffPost interview,

We came back [from Detroit], made a trailer, and started to show it around. We raised the money very quickly -- turned out there were other people also very interested in Detroit. PBS came on board, and Ford Foundation, and next thing you knew, we were moving to Detroit. We rented two apartments in downtown Detroit, got two cars, and basically stayed for a year. We didn't know what we were going to do.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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