At one point in “Sons of Detroit,” Boo needs to explain to someone why he calls the man who is filming him his cousin, not only raising suspicions as anyone would who brings a camera to the working class neighborhood of Chandler Park, but when also when they don’t share the same skin color. Boo offers a concise description of how Jeremy Xido ended up spending so much of time at his house as a child that his parents Myrtis and Jimmy essentially considered him family, but it takes Xido a lot longer to unpack in the documentary where the filmmaker revisits the city where he spent his formative years as a white child of seemingly colorblind parents who moved to the midwest from the Bay Area where they had been radical activists and settled into a predominantly Black area. The family was welcomed with open arms, but whereas Xido moved on to a career as a performance artist and filmmaker, it never entirely clicked that those he had grown up around and showed him so much love didn’t have the same opportunities and while he could look back fondly on his childhood and made those romanticized recollections a part of his autobiographical art, it didn’t necessarily ring true for everyone.
Xido doesn’t make any excuses for these blind spots as he returns to Detroit after many years spent traveling the world, either on tour with one of his one-man shows or filming, and finds one of the most complex stories during a period of his life he thought of as a much simpler time. Almost immediately upon his arrival, he’s warmly embraced by Marsha “Music” Battle Philpot, a fiery local artist like himself who nonetheless tells him that while his tale fits into the city of Detroit, “it can feel like you’re Tarzan” swinging in. However, in walking down the same streets he did as a child, he begins to see his youth with the perspective of an adult who starts to question why he went over to Myrtis and Jimmy’s house so often as his own parents had a turbulent relationship and the community that he found so much compassion in was less connected naturally than brought together by the discriminatory real estate practice of redlining. With many of his old Chandler Park haunts now abandoned, he has to consider how his own departure contributed to the vicious cycle that has prevented so many others from pursuing their dreams and in a compelling fusion of the stagecraft he’s picked up over the years performing personal monologues and filming the experience of reuniting with friends and family from the block he used to live on, he’s able to articulate things that would be too difficult to find the words for as he becomes conscious of them himself.
With the film’s premiere at DOC NYC this week (accompanied by an ability to stream the film from anywhere in the U.S. on the festival’s online platform through the end of November), Xido graciously took the time to talk about how he put his soul-searching on camera, equally emotionally heavy days for the crew on the production and finding out you can go back home.
You explain it a bit in the film, but how did a film even come about from all this?
It was a disastrous mistake was how the film came about.
I’m glad for it, by the way.
Good, good. So am I. It’s funny because I’m in New York again [for the DOC NYC premiere]. I haven’t been here for a while and this is really where the idea for the film was born. I had been performing a one-man autobiographical performance piece around the world and then I performed it at PS122 in New York. And the editor from my first film, “Death Metal Angola,” was in the audience. Afterwards, we went and had a drink and he said “Jeremy, I love the piece. I think that you could do a Spalding Gray-esque lecture film with this. The script is already there. It’s really simple. You just need to get a theater, go up and shoot it and it’s done.” I let him convince me that that was a good idea and I figured well the best place to do it would be in Detroit because I hadn’t been home in in 20 years.
I contacted folks at the Detroit Institute of Arts and I pitched them this idea and they [said] “This is wonderful,” so I went with my three-part piece to perform at the Detroit Institute of Arts and then it was a complete and total utter disaster. I had performed it all over the globe [by this point] to great critical acclaim. And then in Detroit, I had some folks from the neighborhood that I grew up in that I hadn’t seen in 20 years who were there. After the performance, they took me aside and they’re like, “You can’t do that. You said some things up there that are just wrong and you’re a person who has this experience and maybe you can’t see certain things, but you need to figure it out.” And I was floored. I thought that I would be perceived as a prodigal son returned and it couldn’t be further from the truth. That experience set into motion the need to come back and really engage both with my past and with the people of my past and with the city itself. That became the impetus for this film and then that process took another six or seven years to be able to very slowly and painfully wind my way through until now, when we’re at another place.
Something that’s so compelling about this comes from how it’s structured to mirror your own consciousness of this history, informed by what you know now. It sounds like that might’ve come directly from your own blind spots, but could you set aside what you know now to express that to an audience?
It’s a really interesting question because my experience of my neighborhood is tremendously nostalgic and naively so. I’d held onto [this memory] throughout my life to this extraordinary beauty and sense of belonging that I experienced, growing up as a kid in a Black neighborhood as part of a Black family, going back and forth between my neighbor’s house and my parents’ house. So there was a glossing over in my mind of all the difficult hardships that we then experience. The film begins in this memory place around this heart attack that I had in which that nostalgia is what emerges. But underneath that nostalgia — and that whole section [of the film] ends with this tree that was where I felt safe. But there’s an unsettled discord in that particular image [which is what] led me to run away from Detroit and not go back in 20 years, that I had in some ways repressed and I started mythologizing of Detroit [in a way] I got from the outside that people seem to really enjoy, [recalling this] hard life of Detroit and whatnot that was in conflict with this childlike space of belonging.
The film really is a process of tracking a consciousness in which there’s this battle that’s taking place between this child voice [of mine] and a wounded adult’s attempt to make sense of why I was thrown out of this space of belonging, and then a more mature adult at a later stage in life, looking back and trying to piece together where those conflicts are and how that led to a fractured self. So there are these different selves throughout that are all in dialogue with each other and battling each other and I think part of the battle is to get to a place in which they can all live together and not silence one another [because] they’re all equally true, but they lead to a place where there’s a potential for reconciliation and healing to emerge that hadn’t been [possible] without [understanding] the nostalgic piece and it’s impossible without the unfolding of both history and also personal family history.
The conversations with family and friends are obviously quite difficult and in one moment in the film, you actually have the camera turn to the sound guy, who is in tears. Was the mood always pretty heavy on this?
Yeah, it’s the interviews are really interesting in the sense that Russell, the sound guy who is also a co-producer on the film, had lived through the experiences that I have lived through and all our crew had, so as people talked about it, everybody was triggered in that room. And Russell, because he was listening very closely and he had the boom, every once in a while, he’d be like, “Wait, wait, wait. No, that’s not true.” He would immediately interject himself in a place that was totally inappropriate in terms of a professional decorum of filmmaking, but on a human level, he was absolutely right. He realized that so many of the answers that I’m looking for are actually in the people that are around me, and professional decorum is irrelevant in the face of how we were all processing trauma.
So that example you mentioned in which Russell cries was a really painful moment that we were all talking about, and Russell is just listening to it. It just hits him, and he had other moments throughout, but that was the most emotional moment where his tears ultimately are all of our tears at that moment. And that was really important for me to start to understand is that I’m telling my story from my point of view, but there’s this process of scraping away my own consciousness and my own sets of prejudices and things that I’m not very proud of at the same time it’s a story where the resonances are much bigger than my story and they touch all of us in this community. Then ideally beyond that, [the story] will resonate to folks who are not from Detroit, but are somehow part of this miasma that we’ve all grown up in and exist in and that we’re all struggling with.
Was difficult to figure out what your own presence would be in the film when you do have that conflict? You do cede the film to other perspectives ultimately.
Yeah, without a doubt, and it’s interesting because the DNA of the piece really comes from “The Angola Project,” which is a lecture performance where I’m speaking. And there’s these black box sequences that are very controlled in which I’m speaking to camera and I’m creating the story and then the world outside starts to erode the confidence of that voice and requires a search for things that in the beginning [this character I’m playing is] not even capable of doing or understanding that he’s able to do. And it’s that relationship between my controlled telling — because at the end of the day, I’m directing it, I’m editing it, I have more control than anybody else. There are major ethical issues in the entire endeavor — but trying to nod towards the way in which the wild space of the world that I can’t control is actually shifting and changing the narrative. I have to then react to along the way and by the end, I have to question the very act of controlling story the way that I’ve done it throughout the film. It’s also a lot of what I needed to do as a human being was to shut up at a certain point and to be able to actually hear the things that I didn’t know [from others]. and then to process them and reframe my fractured self into something new. It’s that constant play between the external world and the internal world that is at play throughout the film.
When you’ve gone back and forth from performing on stage to directing documentaries, have the mediums informed one another?
One of the things I feel very fortunate about is that [“Sons of Detroit”] is an unusual film. It lives in a documentary space, but we never thought of it as a documentary. It’s a film and it has these different modes of storytelling and I worked with people who encouraged the relationship between theater and filmmaking, the ways in which they both can’t function together and the ways in which they inform one another. So there’s a bridge into filmmaking and from the performance that’s in the very material of the film and it allowed me to be critical of the ways in which I had approached theater and approached performance work and writing. Both the way in which I think about film now and the way I think about stage have transformed in the making of this film. I’ve been working as an actor in a lot of movies and series [of late], which is a very different beast, but I look forward to being able to go back to stage and see who I am at this moment and what kinds of stories and the way in which I approach it has transformed.
What’s it like getting to this point with the film and getting ready to share with the world?
It’s absolutely fabulous, in part because i it’s been nearly a decade in the making. We thought we were done at a number of different times and realized we absolutely were not. It was not what it needed to be. And I feel like I’m at a place in which the film does for me what it needs to do. I don’t often have that feeling with my work necessarily. There are things I like about it, but this I feel like it is what it’s supposed to be and that has been reaffirmed by all parts of my family that have watched the film and are with me with it. They feel that it both represents something that they feel is true and that they are proud to participate in. Even if I spearheaded it, it’s something that we have all done together and feels like “This is ours.” And then the other side that’s really extraordinary is that I’m in New York where there are 20 of the people who worked on the film and we all get to share this moment together [after] we’ve all invested parts of ourselves. That’s not always easy for people. There are a lot of arguments and a lot of difficult topics that were broached throughout the making of it, but I feel like we’re all at a place where it’s a very celebratory moment and we have an after party with the DJ from Detroit and a whole bunch of people are coming, so it’s just like, “Let’s show this film. Let’s have it in the world. We’ll see wherever it goes,” but we’re going to take this moment to just love on each other and to thank each other in the deepest way we can. I feel really, really lucky that I have this opportunity.
“Sons of Detroit” will screen at DOC NYC at the Village East on November 13th at 7 pm and November 14th at 1:15 pm. It will also be available to watch online via DOC NYC’s streaming platform from November 14th through November 30th.