Detropia

Fascinating... but also misleading.
I was born in Detroit, and spent the first 33 years of my life living there, and even after moving out, I'm still just two miles away. I spent most of my adult life working there. I just watched Detropia, and my first reaction was that visually it gives an excellent picture of what much of Detroit has become. Where is falls short is in the history- it's as if the past 40 years of political mismanagement and outright theft never took place. The filmmakers present a narrative in which big companies outsourced all the jobs, and the rich got together and decided to destroy the middle class and oppress the poor. But that's nonsense. Detroit's problems aren't easily explained in terms of bankrupt Marxist ideology.

We had several mayors who chased working people out of the city and plundered the public treasury. But we also had one- Dennis Archer- who had the city on a path to renewal before he was replaced by his criminally corrupt successor. Detroit's property taxes are the...

A Striking Documentary Contrasts A Great City Of Yore With The Decaying Metropolis of Today
The new documentary "Detropia" by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (Jesus Camp) is, at once, an homage to a great city and its eulogy. In 1930, Detroit was considered the fastest growing city in the world. Today, it is shrinking at an alarming rate having lost a quarter of its population in the last decade alone. In this striking film, a diverse cross section of Detroit citizens muse about days gone by as they struggle with the economic reality of their city in crisis. Shot in almost a post-apocalyptic splendor, "Detropia" has an almost haunting quality that is hard to describe. Its cameras take in the landscape of an abandoned metropolis and fill this canvas with snippets of real life stories. In many ways, these are tales of survival complete with happy memories and a nostalgia for the way things were. While it doesn't offer many solutions to the current conditions (nor could it really), it paints a pretty vivid picture of the unpleasantness associated with contemporary economic...

Disturbing yet intriguing
I was born in Detroit, and lived in the area until 10 years when both my husband and my companies closed and we had to move out of state. I was so sad to watch this film. Detroit has a great history and I am old enough to remember when it was strong and vibrant and also have seen its fall. Its current state is the result of years of mismanagement, racism and nearsightedness that drove out the middle class and left its current shell. What the film maker shows is real, but what she doesn't show is why it is so. The collapse of the auto industry definitely had an impact but frankly even if that didn't happen Detroit would be in the same position. This movie is bleak but I think it missed its mark. Detroit is not an innocent victim. It has allowed itself to be the victim and has done nothing to help itself for over 40 years. That does not come through in the film.

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