Detropia
New documentary from the team behind Jesus Camp poses a lot of difficult questions, but comes up with few answers.
DIRECTED BY HEIDI EWING and RACHEL GRADY (USA, Special Presentations)
Saturday, May 5, 5:45 p.m.
Bloor Hot Docs Cinema (506 Bloor Street West)
Anyone who’s watched television in the past year has probably seen the “Imported from Detroit” series of Chrysler ads, which show the beleaguered Motor City on the mend, in part because American cars are better than they’ve been in years.
Detropia, the new documentary by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (of Jesus Camp fame), is a sort of response to those ads. It shows a Detroit that is, in some ways, worse off than ever before. Aside from a few new artists coming to town, attracted huge empty lofts and a cheap cost of living, Detroit is not on the mend. It’s broke, literally falling apart, and has tens of thousands of abandoned houses, which have an uncanny tendancy to go up in flames. Oh, and many of those new American cars are largely built in Mexico.
Ewing and Grady do a great job of humanizing the decline of one of America’s great cities, introducing viewers to some of the big personalities who’ve opted to try and stick it out at the centre of the rust belt. There’s Tommy, the bar owner who’s hoping a new shift at the GM plant will fill his bar with thirsty workers again; George, the union president who has just had to watch more of his people get laid off following an unsuccessful negotiation; and the group of nameless young men who, in the absence of actual jobs, scrape out a living taking scrap metal from abandoned buildings. After spending 90 minutes getting to know these people, it’s almost impossible not to empathize with them.
What Ewing and Grady don’t do is try to offer solutions. That’s because, as Detropia makes so clear, the problems that plague the city are so complex and multi-layered, there may not be any.