Freep Film Festival: Internal Combustion Saturday, March 21st 6:30pm Detroit Film Theatre

Director Steve Faigenbaum’s return to Detroit after a 25-year absence jolts him into a introspective and expansive exploration of the collapse of a once-great city as he compares it to touchstones in his own family’s history: The Jewish immigrant experience against the African-American experience, the riots of 1943 and 1967, fears surrounding the Vietnam War, white flight to the suburbs, the auto industry’s ebbs and flows, and the ultimate question of whether or not Detroit can rise again. Using archival footage,

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Faigenbaum effectively portrays Detroit as a complicated city so often at war with itself. It’s a good reminder that city’s problems – and its optimism – go back much further than the recent past of bankruptcy, Kwame and the Great Recession. Modern-day testimony around the 1969 violence between Republic of New Africa…