Detroit had become a punchline, not a place.
The biggest American city ever to go bankrupt, Detroit was national shorthand for ruin, its story told in drone shots of empty factories and never in the voices of the people still living and fighting there.
The film had to do the opposite of the headlines: find the comeback already underway, block by block, in the people the cameras kept skipping.
We embedded with the community leaders who refused to give up, the pastors and teachers and organizers and neighbors doing the unglamorous, shoestring work of taking their blocks back from decline.
Their conviction, not the wreckage, became the spine of the film, told in three movements: the buildings, the land, and the people.
