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Two years ago,Japanese sex movies most of the country hadn’t heard of Flint, Mich.

I grew up about 30 minutes from the southeast Michigan town, and even then it was ubiquitous only for its proximity. Going to the movies? I-75 north toward Flint. The University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, Dearborn, or Flint? Over time, Flint fell into disrepair, synonymous with poverty, poor infrastructure, and insurmountable struggle, yet even this was eclipsed by the shadow of Detroit, an hour away and with its own promising future snuffed out as the 20th century closed.

In the 1980s, Flint boasted one of the highest average household incomes in the nation. Today it’s one of the lowest. But the city’s journey is still unfolding; it caught the attention of filmmakers Zackary Canepari and Drea Cooper, who passed through while making the documentary T-REX, who returned along with co-director Jessica Dimmock to explore the city further.

"I think we just really connected with the community, saw parts of the community that were really sort of – just not really the way that people generally think of Flint," Canepari told Mashable in a phone interview. "Much more sort of charismatic, magnetic, and [we] just kind of stuck around and kept making things there."

And that’s how Flint Townstarted.

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Flint Town takes a look at the city through its police department, staffed during production by roughly 100 police officers serving a population of almost 100,000. There hasn't been an officer-involved shooting in the city in recent years, but it's been a source of tension since the death of Mike Brown in Ferguson in 2013, or the death of Philando Castile during production.

How can you expect the community to trust the police when they can't even trust their government to provide them clean water?

"I think that, especially after the protests in Ferguson, we were keen to figure out how to get inside a police department to see what was going on day-to-day so as to better understand who becomes an officer, and why," Cooper said in a Netflix press release. "How do they approach their work, and what do they really think about the community and people they’re meant to serve?"

Cooper said that Flint Town using law enforcement as a lens is more to highlight the importance of public safety; both officers and citizens want things to improve, but neither can do so without the other's cooperation or without necessary resources and infrastructure.

"It felt like a way to engage in that conversation in a way that was really raw," Dimmock said. "Some of those issues about community/police trust and that relationship obviously are still there and so it felt like a more honest way to explore it."

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The directors laid the necessary groundwork to gaining inside access to Flint's police department. Some knew Cooper and Canepari from T-REX, which was viewed as a positive portrayal of Flint, and were open to discussing the difficulties of working in Flint and day-to-day life in the city.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

From a filmmaking perspective, Flint Town paces itself. The first episodes brace the viewer for violence, yet in its quiet moments it deals with bureaucracy and administration, as would any job outside one of the nation's most dangerous cities in the middle of a deadly water crisis.

"Our film, our project, is trying to tell the story of the people that are trying to make it work," Canepari said. "And they’re struggling to do so because they’ve got such a lack of resources, but they’re trying. And it’s not always pretty, it’s not always right, but they are still standing there and they are still – and it’s not just the police, it’s the community, it’s the mayor, all these different characters that are trying to see this thing improve."

Crucially, the water crisis is not the focus. It is those individuals fighting against the tide, as Canepari said, working around the clock, understaffed, requiring hours to address calls that another city could dispatch in minutes.

"Until somebody steps up and makes some real changes – not within Flint, outside of Flint – about dealing with poverty and infrastructure and education and all these things, this is not just gonna be a problem in Flint, it’s gonna be replicated in other cities and communities all across the country," Cooper said.

The series comes to a head with the November 2016 election, a watershed moment for the country and for Flint because of a local election. As the date grew near, Cooper said he saw the growing divide among Americans on a micro scale in the Flint police department – with white officers on one side and black officers on the other.

"People’s political positions don’t get formed simply because they’re police; they get formed over decades and generations and so many factors play into how you align yourself politically," Cooper said. "At the core of this is race and poverty, and how we think about race and poverty, and how police think about it and how the community thinks about it."

Several years and a Lifetime movie later, Flint is still coping with the water crisis as daily upheavals and tragedies barrage the American public. Cooper calls Flint a "poster child for the American Dream gone awry," but Flint Townacquaints us intimately with its players, to whom this isn't a blip in the daily news cycle but an inescapable facet of daily life.

"This is a place that has been in dire straits for four decades," Cooper said. "It’s been ignored and been abandoned and absolutely is super important in the national conversation about urban America."

And if we listen, that conversation can shift.

Flint Townis now streaming on Netflix.

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