On a warm summer night in July, a group of kids minding their own business end up face to face with a militarized squad of racist cops. It sounds like a conflict you’d read about in the news today. But this particular encounter took place in 1967, kickstarting the riots portrayed in Academy Award-winner Kathryn Bigelow’s new film, Detroit.
On July 23, 1967, the Detroit Police Vice Squad raided an unlicensed after-hours bar on the corner of 12th Street and Clairmount Avenue. The bar was filled with young people having a good time, in the center of the city’s oldest and poorest black neighborhood. The raid, which led to rioting, looting, and wrongful death, was the culmination of escalating tensions during the peak of the civil rights movement.
This story, of one of the most violent urban revolts of the 20th century, now sets the stage for a new film from The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow. Earlier today, Annapurna Pictures released the first trailer for the upcoming drama Detroit, setting an August 4 release date to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Detroit riots.
Bigelow is the first, and only, woman to win an Academy Award for Best Director, the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing, the BAFTA Award for Best Direction,and the Critics’ Choice Movie Award for Best Director. The script for Detroit was written by her longtime collaborator Mark Boal. And the film’s cast includes John Boyega, Chris Chalk, Nathan Davis Jr., Kaitlyn Dever, Austin Hébert, and John Krasinski.
The city of Detroit has undergone major changes since 1967, thanks partly to a new generation of creative residents finding inspiration from the city and making the move to start their own communities. Since its declaration of bankruptcy in 2013, Detroit has found a new voice which reckons with its tumultuous history while shedding light on the beautiful city discovering itself all over again. Although Detroit is still struggling financially, this emerging artistic renaissance is a source of hope.
The film arrives in a decade of increased conversation around police brutality, at a time when movements like Black Lives Matter are sparking social change across the U.S., the fight for clean water in Flint, MI seems like a never-ending battle, and street-level civil unrest is all but impossible to ignore.
Check out the trailer for ‘Detroit’ below.
Credits
Text Jo Rosenthal
Image via YouTube