With America’s largest documentary film festival, DOC NYC, kicking off on November 12, we’re pleased to premiere the first trailer and poster for one of the most-anticipated world premieres, Jeremy Xido’s Sons of Detroit. Exploring race, violence, and love in 1970s Detroit as the film captures the director returning home for the first time in two decades, the project was executive produced by Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson (Going To Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project).
Here’s the synopsis: “After a heart attack on stage in Berlin nearly kills him, internationally renowned performer and filmmaker Jeremy Xido returns home to Detroit for the first time in over 20 years to confront demons from his past. As the only child of Marxist parents and the only white kid in his neighborhood, Jeremy was taken in and raised as one of the cousins in a Black family in 1970s Detroit. He returns home many years later to find their house in ruins and his family scattered. To piece together what happened, he searches out his cousin, Boo, who is also recently home after 20 years in prison. Together, the two men unravel tangled threads of race, belonging, violence, and love that shaped their lives. Part love letter, part detective story, SONS OF DETROIT blurs genres, weaving together documentary, performance art, and storytelling. Through the story of a single family in America’s quintessential city, the film raises urgent questions. What does it mean to be White? What’s the price we pay for running from our past? How do we heal in the wake of tremendous destruction?”
“Sons of Detroit is structured around what we call the “Black Box,” a sort of space that returns again and again,” said director Jeremy Xido. “The consciousness (or the shifting point of view) of the film emerges from and is forged here. As we were trying to wrap our heads around how to approach the storytelling and how voiceover might function, we had three references: Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, and Alan Ball/Sam Mendes’ American Beauty. In each of these films, the narrator is either speaking from beyond the grave, from the razor’s edge between life and death or from the witness stand, a place of future reckoning. Each one of the narrators is the same as the character on screen, but is a version of that character who has privileged knowledge that the character we’re seeing in “real time” on screen doesn’t have.. The Voice is the future self of the character.”
See the trailer and poster below.
The post Exclusive Trailer for Sons of Detroit Finds a Filmmaker Returning to a Quintessential American City first appeared on The Film Stage.
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