Netflix’s latest documentary series, Flint Town, explores the background and trajectory of this city how poverty, police relations, and a notorious water crisis took a heavy toll.
Flint is a city of 100,000 people with roughly 0.1 percent of that staffing the police force. In the trailer, multiple residents express mistrust for the law or hopelessness at what the city – once a promising automotive hub ranked high in safety and potential – has become.
The eight-part Flint Town looks at Flint’s mounting struggles through the lens of its understaffed law enforcement and follows them for a year of the debilitating water crisis. In the directors’ own words, “Flint really never stops.”
“Flint feels so unique and forgotten,” director Zackary Canepari said in a press release. “It’s a charismatic, weird place that has been on the fringes for so long that the abnormal has become normal. And there was a strong tendency, even during the height of the water crisis, for outsiders to see Flint in one-dimension. But it’s not one-dimensional. ”
Events like a millage vote and the 2016 presidential election lent themselves naturally to the year-in-the-life narrative, as did approaching the city through an ensemble of police officers.
