"Healing Detroit" tells stories of community care
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Producer/cinematographer Desmond Love filming food distribution in Brightmoor. Photo: Courtesy of "Alive in Detroit"
A filmmaker telling the stories of Detroiters navigating the challenging U.S. health care system has debuted a mini-documentary series on social media.
Why it matters: Community organizations, charities and individuals have long helped fill gaps in Detroit's inequitable health care system. But people don't necessarily know about those resources.
- Filmmaker Shiraz Ahmed aims to tell their stories, preserve their history and make their informal networks of care more visible.
State of play: The "Healing Detroit" videos on Instagram reflect the rich information, personalities and history that Ahmed documented as he dug into community health efforts for several related projects over about five years.
Context: The shorts are published in collaboration with local environmental publication Planet Detroit. They're a companion to his nearly complete documentary, "Alive in Detroit," which was motivated by activism and his personal experience with health care challenges.
- Subjects include the history of Detroit's Black-owned hospitals, Black-led urban farming and the U.S.'s oldest continuously operating free clinic.
- Ahmed tells Axios that the videos have drawn commenters sharing their own health care experiences and memories of local institutions.
Behind the scenes: Ahmed learned while making his documentary that its human stories were more compelling than trying to explain the complex problems with health care systems.
- Test audiences said they were most drawn to watching "the 'people living their lives' aspect of the film," Ahmed says.
He also chose to try to avoid common medical documentary settings he finds unpleasant, like ERs or doctors’ offices.
- Free health initiatives he documented sought to draw people in with welcoming events, like a 5K in southwest Detroit and a men's health fair at Ford Field.
What they're saying: "The individuals in the film are facing very difficult circumstances, so part of it was just trying to be creative about how we worked with them and how we told their stories," Ahmed says.
- He describes one subject of the documentary, who is "older and loves music," a born-and-raised Detroiter. "But she wasn't familiar with techno music."
- "We took her to Charivari, which is a free techno festival. … That's not specifically health care-related, right? But it was still this very kind of charming experience to bring these two worlds together."
What's next: Funding remains the feature film's final hurdle. There's still sound and color work to go.
- Ahmed aims to screen the film in Detroit, but hasn't announced a concrete timeline yet.
Watch the Healing Detroit vignettes … More on the series from Planet Detroit