Film programme
Requiem for Detroit (Rekvijem za Detroit)
Directed by: Julien Temple
Country: Great Britain
Year: 2010
Running time: 75 min
Cinematography: Steve Organ
Cast: Grace Lee Boggs, Tyree Guyton, Martha Reeves, John Sinclair
Producer: George Hencken
Produced by: Films of Record, Ten Alps
Synopsis: This is a film about the rise and fall of Detroit, the fourth biggest city in the US, the home of American automobile industry and one of the epicenters of music of the 20th century. Until 2009, Motor City, as people called it, was a city of enormous factories, mass production, wide highways, charming middle class suburbs filled with shopping malls, the luxury of western capitalism... Julien Temple’s documentary is a story of the cash cow and the crisis that destroyed the image of American Dream. One in five houses in Detroit today is empty, one third of the workforce is unemployed, 49 percent of the children live below poverty, 29 percent of schools are closed, but the dark statistics is just one side to this story. Can the city survive the economic “Katrina?” Does it have enough strength to become once again a pioneer, this time of the post-American Dream?
Director's Biography: Julien Temple was born in 1953 in London. He had no special interest in film until he, as a student of Royal College, discovered the work of Jean Vigo, the director who will later become his role model. When he enrolled into the National Film and Television School he met the Sex Pistols. This friendship resulted in a short documentary Sex Pistols Number 1, followed by The Great Rock and Roll Swindle, which talks about the rise and fall of the band from the perspective of their manager Malcolm McLaren, at the time when Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious left the band. After that, Temple made a series of music videos for the Kinks, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Bryan Adams, Depeche Mode, Kenny Rogers, Neil Young, Whitney Houston…In 2000 he filmed another documentary about the Sex Pistols, The Filth and the Fury, after which he made a long documentary about Glastonbury Festival. In 2006 he directed a film about his old friend Joe Strummer, The Future is Unwritten, and in 2009 he finished his trilogy about British music scene in the seventies with Oil City Confidential dedicated to Dr. Feelgood. This year he is signing Requiem for Detroit, a documentary about the collapse of Motor City and American Dream.
RSS