‘Resurgo,’ Detroit doc 20 years in the making, heads to Ann Arbor

Filmmaker Stephen McGee has been working on his film since he moved to Detroit in 2005.

Stephen McGee has spent so long making his Detroit documentary “Resurgo: The Rise From Within” — he’s been filming it for 20 years, and shaping it for at least the last 10 — that he’s having a hard time walking away from the project.

As the city it documents lives and breathes, so does the film, and McGee isn’t quite ready to lock in his final edit. Even after showing the film several times, he’s still tinkering with it, adding in a quote here or a few frames of footage there every time he shows it to a new audience.

“It’s hard to know when a 20-year project is done,” says McGee, who has been documenting Detroit since he moved to the city in 2005. “Each screening is a new way to see the life of this film and where it should go, or how it’s going to live.”

His next screening is Friday, when McGee shows the film at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor. It will be his biggest screening yet, following late 2025 showings at the Emagine Royal Oak and the Birmingham 8, as well as a premiere at October’s Fresh Coast Film Festival in Marquette, where “Resurgo” was awarded the festival’s Best Feature prize. He has future screenings planned in Grand Rapids (Feb. 26) and Farmington Hills (March 7).

McGee, 44, describes “Resurgo” — the title is Latin for “I rise again” — as a “visual symphony of humanity.” It covers the Motor City’s history and its rise and fall through its 2013 bankruptcy to its current state, and McGee talks to residents and civic leaders about the city’s character, resilience, spirit and resolve.

McGee, who grew up in California and moved to Detroit in 2005 when he was hired as a photographer at the Detroit Free Press, has had a front row seat to one of the city’s most stunning rehab projects: His Corktown house sits across the street from Michigan Central, and he has documented the building’s revival in an official capacity for Ford.

That perspective provides a framework for “Resurgo,” along with McGee’s personal story as a husband and father of two living inside the city. The film — which features footage of Jack White and Kid Rock, and narration by Big Sean — then dives into Detroit’s present and past, its comeback narratives and its rejection of comeback narratives.

McGee culled the film — or is still culling the film, as it were — from thousands of hours of footage and millions of photographs, with which he’s filled some 50 or 60 hard drives, he says. He drew inspiration from “Baraka,” director Ron Fricke’s 1992 documentary, which used no narration or voiceover to tell its story of humanity.

His partner on the film is Jessica Care Moore, Detroit’s poet laureate, whom he met while doing a TEDX Detroit event in 2010 and has since become a close friend and collaborator.

“‘Resurgo’ is gorgeous, it’s (McGee’s) heart on his sleeve,” says Moore, who carries a producer credit on the film. She says she appreciates McGee’s perspective as an outsider to the city, as well as his ability to listen to and observe voices inside the city and help tell their stories, hers among them.

McGee’s work is “undeniable,” Moore says. “We’re going to keep making films together, ‘Resurgo’ is just the beginning,” she says.

Since leaving the Free Press in 2007, McGee worked as a freelance photographer and videographer, and he has done projects with Ford, Dan Gilbert — McGee did Detroit’s 2017 pitch video for an Amazon headquarters in the city — and the Kresge Foundation.

At one point he says he was close to securing a seven-figure sum from a major investor to complete work on “Resurgo,” but the deal eventually fell apart.

“Having that fall through was probably one of the best things that ever happened to the movie,” McGee says. “Because if I would have had the pressure to finish a film because of a budget, this wouldn’t be the film that it is.”

As “Resurgo” began to take shape, McGee always kept the end product in mind, even if he wasn’t sure what it would resemble. “I’ve made trailers for it basically every year, because I had to tell myself that the project was real,” he says.

He then hit the edit hard in 2024 and started coming up for air with it late last year. He began submitting “Resurgo” to film festivals and showing it to local audiences, selling out several screenings.

McGee would like to take “Resurgo” on the film festival circuit and eventually secure a distribution deal.

He’s also considering touring it around the country and leading discussions after the film, since he’s had healthy Q&A sessions with audiences after each screening of the film thus far, notes from which he’s taken with him back to the editing bay. He also sees parallels with what Detroit has been through to emerging storylines in cities across the country, including his hometown in San Francisco’s Bay Area.

During a visit to Ann Arbor last week, McGee pounded the pavement and handed out flyers to passersby to get the word out about Friday’s screening. Standing on stage at the Michigan Theater, McGee gazed out at the auditorium of the historic venue, with 1,500 empty seats laid out before him.

It felt daunting, he said, and then exciting as it began to wash over him.

“It kind of feels like the film’s real,” he said. “Sometimes it doesn’t feel that way, but now it does.”

agraham@detroitnews.com

‘Resurgo: The Rise From Within’

7 p.m. Friday

Michigan Theatre, 603 E. Liberty St., Ann Arbor

Tickets $11.75 for adults, $9.75 for students and seniors

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