From KCRW, Santa Monica and KCRW.com, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment, but you can also hear at KCRW.com.

My guest, producer, director, is Heidi Ewing, and Rachel Grady.

Have a way of making films that get under your skin because they ask questions about institutions.

We don't often see ask.

The previous films, of course, include the Oscar-nominated Jesus Camp,

boys of Baraka.

They're here with the newest film, Detropia, a look at Detroit from a number of different perspectives,

not all of which are basically the status quo.

Guys, thanks so much for being here. My first question, where does the title of Detroitopia come from?

Well, it was the brilliant brainwork of Heidi. She invented it, but we all totally embraced it.

It makes the viewer think,

are we referring to a utopia, or are we referring to a dystopia? Or entropy? Or entropy?

Any of them, yes, there's a lot of peas that you can explore. A lot of trophies. You're not winning with any of these trophies, but there's lots of trophies here. Right. And, you know, Detroit was considered a utopia.

It was considered sort of the heart of the American dream.

As you guys mentioned in the film in 1930, the fastest growing city in the world.

The birthplace of the middle class, especially the black middle class.

So it was a utopia, as Rachel says, for a lot of people. And also, it's funny because there's a shot in the film where there's an auto part store that has been shuttered. And an artist has gone in, a clever artist, has re-made the sign to read Utopia. You can miss it if you blink a couple of times in the film. But that sort of inspired a conversation around our office about what is a utopia, what is a dystopia,

and we played with the combination of words.

Because again, what you guys are so interested in looking at institutions versus real people

versus citizens, and that schism, that tension.

And I'm wondering what it was about Detroit that made that fit into your sensibility,

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