Flint is a Place is a cross-platform documentary series that explores the city and its problems in an intimate, character-driven way. The overall project uses a variety of media – film, photography, audio, design, VR – with stories finding their way into the world via partnerships with the likes of the New York Times and Netflix.

The Flint is a Place website currently contains four episodes, each of which tells the story of a particular person or systemic issue relating to the city, using a combination of video, photography and text. One episode is about a teenage mother named Briana. Her sister, Olympic gold medal boxer Claressa T-Rex Shields is the subject of another chapter. Flint Police Department – one of the most understaffed and overworked departments in the country – is also explored through a documentary series on Netflix. There’s also an episode celebrating the style of high school prom and an episode that focuses on the history of Flint using archival material. And, of course, there is a chapter about water.

The project was begun five years ago by documentary photographer Zackary Canepari. In 2011, he had made a short film series called California is a Place with co-director Drea Cooper. “Flint is a Place,” Canepari says, “is kind of the version 2.0 of that project” taking advantage of all the technical advances that have taken place since, such as video streaming.

Canepari’s first involvement with Flint was via the film he and Cooper made about Claressa T-Rex Shields. “T-Rex was kind of my entry point into Flint,” he says. “And through Claressa I really felt a connection with the community and the city. I just felt there was more work to do there. So I kept digging and scratching and finding stories I wanted to tell.”

What is it about Flint that makes it such a powerful metaphor for talking about many other issues about American society? “It’s an interesting question as the same thing happened in so many other cities but for whatever reason Flint always seemed like ground zero for American mismanagement or whatever you want to call it,” he says. “It’s such a clear, encapsulated version of the American dream turned into the American nightmare. For four decades, it’s been portrayed as this struggling, dysfunctional, broken [place]. [But] what I found there was this really unique community. They were raw, they were honest, they were candid, they were outspoken, they were really switched on – fun, smart, a lot of life force – all of these things that make for great relationships and great subjects for storytelling. So that’s what drew me in.”

“[In the way it is often portrayed Flint is] always the victim, always this broken, ugly place,” he continues. “We work really hard to find stories that are more celebratory as well. I’m basically trying to keep Flint as meaningful as possible for as long as possible, and that’s the body of the work. We’re creating a spiderweb of material so that maybe you see Briana’s story or you see the Prom stuff and then that draws b you in and you say ‘oh what’s going on in this community?’ and then you understand it better.”

Canepari and his core collaborators are always looking for partners to help get their stories out. The New York Times originally published the Prom story and a VR piece about the police department; Canepari created the Netflix series Flint Town about Flint’s Police Department with Cooper and Jessica Dimmock.

“I’m always looking for the best way to tell the story – that’s really how the project is structured,” Canepari says. “All of these different formats are ways for us to look at stories that might not be [easily] told in a short film format or a photo essay. So it’s really just a game of ‘we know what we want to say, so how do we say it?’ We’re an independent media project and we release stuff when we can, when we have it built and everything is in place.”

A key inspiration was TV show The Wire, with Canepari imagining a documentary series that takes the same approach to Flint – with episodes looking at different aspects of the community from schools to law enforcement to politics – as The Wire did with its dramatisation of life in Baltimore. Later this year, he hopes to publish a book which will “probably be the final step of the project”.

In the meantime, Canepari is trying to make sure that the opportunity Flint is a Place has helped create “where we can talk about policy and an agenda for fixing a place like Flint” is not wasted. “The Netflix show made so much noise and buzz – people were on Twitter and really talking about the show and the issues around the show,” he says, “but what ends up happening is the cycle continues and people move on to the next Netflix series. That’s what we’re constantly working with and that’s the stream we’re swimming against, the onslaught of new stuff that keeps coming. We’re just like, ‘that’s great, but [there’s still] this!’ That’s hard, I think it’s worth it, but it’s hard.”

View all the winning work from The Annual 2018 here. 

Entrant: Flint is a Place, Creator: Zackary Canepari, Transmedia Producer: Liza Faktor, Art Director/Graphic Designer: Guillermo Brotons, Interactive Designer Developer: Frederik Delmotte.