"Detropia" Creator: Detroit's a shocking place. You want to shock people to reflect.

Follow the link to an interview in the Huffington Post with Heidi Ewing, the co-creator of "Detropia," the documentary about Detroit that opens tomorrow in New York and next week in Detroit, Royal Oak and Ann Arbor. Ewing is an award-winning filmmaker who grew up in Farmington Hills.

Kristin McCracken: What inspired you to tell this story?

Heidi Ewing: I was born and raised four miles from Detroit; my father and his brothers produced parts for the auto industry. My parents left [the city proper] after the riots, but my Grandma stayed. She was a lifer; she lived in NW Detroit until the bitter end.

All my family still lives there, and whenever I'd come back from visiting, I'd talk about how bad things were getting. So in October of 2009, we said, "Let's just go to Detroit for a few days." We filmed for three days, we met a few people, and we followed them around. It was completely amorphous, and we were just blown away by the people and what they had to say -- the wisdom, this kind of pissed-off, tough, what-the-hell-do-you-want, chip-on-the-shoulder Detroit, you know? It was not warm and fuzzy. At all. [smiles] They were like, "We've got a lot of things to say. Are you all finally ready to hear them? We've been talking for 25 years... "