I’ve seen a lot of movies this week, buckets of triumph and tragedy. But there’s a scene midway through Detropia that tops them all for sheer American heartbreak.

The new documentary, about the struggle to save Detroit, features a tavern owner whose business relies on the Chevy plant across the street. He goes to the annual Detroit Auto Show, excited to see the new Chevy Volt, an electric car his bar patrons build during their shifts at the plant. He’s checking it out, $40,000 price tag and all. Mmm-hm. Nice car. But then he goes across the aisle and sees a new electric car from China. It’s nice. It sells for $20,000. He returns to the Volt sales rep. “Have you seen that Chinese car?” he says. “Oh yeah,” the Chevy guy tells him. “That Chinese stuff is junk. It’s apples and oranges. You can’t compare the two.” 

“Oh really?” the tavern owner says. “Apples and oranges.” You can see the hope for his own survival, and Detroit’s, shatter before your eyes. He’s trying to figure out why a customer would pay an extra $20,000 for the Volt. The numbers just don’t work. “Can I just remind you of a little company called Honda?” he tells the sales rep. “You remember Honda. I was here in the seventies when you said Honda was junk. You remember that?” 

The Chevy rep just smiles. 

Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, the filmmakers behind Detropia, went to the Motor City looking for solutions. “Our original title was 'Detroit Hustles Harder,'" Ewing told the audience after a screening earlier this week. There may be solutions to the city’s economic woes, but they’re neither clear nor easy. Mayor Dave Bing is working on a plan to downsize the immense (in land area) and shrinking (in population) city, and young new urbanists -- white, twenty-something hipsters -- are reviving parts of some neighborhoods. 

But there’s no panacea. The small influx of artists “will help the city, but they alone can’t save it,” said Ewing. “We think entrepreneurs can help,” she said, by bringing new businesses to Detroit. Unfortunately, the city’s crumbling infrastructure works against this. The schools are so bad that “nobody with kids is moving to the city of Detroit,” Ewing said. And the city’s so broke that it’s cutting bus lines -- which means workers can’t get to work. 

Matthew Power explored many of the same issues in “Motown Revival?” That article, one of my favorite OnEarth features last year, and Detropia have got me rethinking my assumptions about cities. Maybe they don’t inevitably live forever. Maybe some have a natural lifespan. Maybe Detroit is simply a lesson to the world: Don’t assume one booming industry will boom forever. Diversify, diversity, diversify.

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Scenes from Sundance: Gotta say, Salt Lake City’s growing on me. Great community radio here: KRCL is playing a mix of Drive-By Truckers, Elvis, and Wild Flag (Carrie Brownstein’s new band) in the morning; KPCW is doing great Sundance interviews and roundtables in the afternoon.

I haven’t seen it, but the indie feature Compliance is getting a huge amount of buzz. Based on a true story, it’s a tale of accusation, police detention, and acquiescence to authority. Critics can’t talk about it without referencing the Milgram experiment, and it’s sparking arguments all over town.

Can somebody please find a way to monetize short films so the rest of the world can see them? I’ve seen some wonderful shorts, ranging from 3 to 30 minutes, but nobody will ever see them outside a film festival or on HBO. Hey PBS, there’s an opportunity here...

Quote from the Queue: “Well, I liked the film. But I would’ve made different choices.”

Celebrities on the Scene: Parker Posey and Julie Delpy blew through town on Wednesday. They spent an hour chatting with New York Times “Carpetbagger” Melena Ryzik, who took over David Carr’s NYT gig covering Hollywood’s award season. Posey, the indie film star known for her work in Christopher Guest’s Waiting for Guffman and Best In Show, is the lead in a new feature called Price Check. Delpy, the French actress, who made her name in Richard Linklater’s films Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, directed Chris Rock in a “deliciously witty romp” (says the film guide) called 2 Days in New York.

Some excerpts from Ryzik's interview: 

Julie Delpy: “Online projects give you a lot of freedom, it’s true, but they are also a lot of labor with no money. Making a movie is expensive. Even if you make it in your backyard with two friends. Eventually those friends will want to eat. And if you can’t feed them, they feel taken advantage of, and you may find they are no longer your friends.” 

Parker Posey on Christopher Guest’s ensemble films, Waiting For Guffman, et al: “Those movies are so special. It’s a very different process. You’re flying by the seat of your pants, improvising on film. And you’re so reliant on the other actors. I imagine it’s something like the feeling musicians get when they’re playing together onstage.” 

Delpy picked up the Christopher Guest thread. “When I first moved here to the United States somebody gave me a copy of Spinal Tap and told me it was a real band. It made me think: Should I really move here?” 

Parker Posey: “Now they play shows, though! Women throw underwear at them!”

A lot of the talk centered around the never-ending struggle to make fresh, thoughtful, quality films. That’s a cliché, but Posey and Delpy were anything but. They came off as genuine people trying to do interesting work, with a willingness to try things and fail. Posey’s a workaholic (“If I’m not working on something, I tend to get depressed,” she said) and Delpy strives to break out of the wan pretty French girl roles she’s forever offered. “I am always trying to go against what people think I should be doing,” she said. That holds true even in the indie world. When she wanted to direct, people told her to make a quirky little indie movie. Her response? “F you, I thought, I will go and make a Chris Rock movie!”

Follow Bruce Barcott's daily reports from the Sundance Film Festival.