Detroit: American Regeneration of a Dead City (5/5)

Detroit: American Regeneration of a Dead City (5/5)

Ghost towns are memorials to the past, witnesses in the present and fragments of the future. This five-part documentary series embarks on a 30,000-km long journey of discovery around the globe, investigating how they come to be. 

Can a small town in the south of Italy save itself from a slow demise? Can uninhabited ruins in southern Turkey be both a stark memorial to a displaced people and the much-loved, spiritual home of the individuals who left? What happens when an entire Chinese generation leaves their children and grandparents in their rural villages? How do the people living around the restricted zone in Fukushima feel, now that their homes have become lethally toxic overnight and won't be inhabitable for decades to come? How does one breathe new life into the huge but bankrupt city of Detroit, where crime levels are rising faster than the ruins are crumbling?

Ghost towns are the result of refugee or migratory movements and are silent witnesses to the most varied of events and developments. This five-part documentary series embarks on a 30,000-km long journey of discovery around the globe, to five seemingly lifeless locations, looking for answers from those who still live in these ghost towns.

Migration is an unwieldy impersonal term, which inelegantly encompasses myriad, very personal stories. By stripping away the cold statistics and telling those individual and colourful stories, the audience is given an insight into the truth of an abstract, global phenomenon

List of episodes:

Episode 1: Riesi: Italy's Emigration Capital

Episode 2: Kayaköy: Turkey's Memorial to a Massive Population Exchange

Episode 3: The Villages of Abandoned Children: China's Missing Generation

Episode 4: Fukushima: Japan's Dead Zone

Episode 5: Detroit: American Regeneration of a Dead City