By Paul Salfen, AMFM Magazine November 2025
When Jeremy Xido collapsed onstage in Europe from a massive heart attack while performing his one-man show The Angola Project, the universe sent a message he could no longer ignore: go home. After eleven years touring the world as a dancer, actor, and director, the Detroit-raised artist returned to the United States—and eventually to the city itself—to confront a past he had spent two decades running from.
The result is Sons of Detroit, a daring new documentary that just had its world premiere at DOC NYC in New York. Part memoir, part performance piece, part family reckoning, the film follows Xido as he brings a theatrical work back to Detroit expecting a hero’s welcome—only to discover that the story he has been telling the world for years contains a lie that only Detroiters would recognize.
“I thought I was coming back as the prodigal son,” Xido told AMFM Magazine’s Paul Salfen in an exclusive interview. “Instead it was a total disaster. There was an untold truth at the core of the piece, and I got taken to task.”
That untold truth? Xido, a white child raised in 1970s and 80s Detroit by revolutionary (and dysfunctional) white parents, was essentially adopted by his neighbors—a large Black family who took him in and raised him alongside their own children. One of those children was his cousin and best friend Boo, the same age as Xido, who spent the last twenty years not touring Europe, but incarcerated.
The film tracks the two men—now both in their late forties—returning to Detroit at the same moment, one from the global stage, the other from prison, to unpack decades of devastation that hit both their family and the city itself.
“It’s about what happens when the world you built for yourself collapses because it was predicated on missed truths and betrayals,” Xido explains. “And then trying to repair that—not just with family, but with yourself.”
What makes Sons of Detroit unlike any other personal documentary is its refusal to let its director off the hook. Xido is forced—often on camera—to confront his own blind spots around race, privilege, and the ways he may have capitalized on a Black family’s story without fully owning the complexities.
In one of the interview’s most memorable moments, Xido describes the guiding principle that emerged during the long editing process: “You’ve got to hug the cactus.” Translation: lean into the pain slowly, let the thorns do their work, and don’t flinch. “I had to say the things I was terrified to say,” he admits. “Yes, I did this. Yes, I behaved like this. And I had to own that I’ve internalized white supremacy like everyone else—then figure out what to do with that knowledge without asking for sympathy.”
The payoff, Xido says, is real reconciliation. Family members who hadn’t spoken in twenty years are now in regular contact. Screenings have left audiences—Black and white—seeing the film through radically different lenses. Some Black viewers have told him it’s “a film for white people to watch white people wrestle with this stuff,” while white viewers often say it’s the first time they truly understood the lived reality of redlining and structural segregation.
Asked what he hopes audiences take away, Xido is clear: entertainment first—“I want them delighted, moved, taken on a journey”—but then reflection. “I want them thinking about their own families, their own silences, the choices they’ve made, and what they’re going to do about the relationships they still have time to repair.”
For aspiring filmmakers inspired to turn their own messy lives into art, Xido’s advice is blunt: expect to get slapped around. “Defense mechanisms are the enemy of a true story,” he says. “Show up. Listen more than you talk. And when it hurts—and it will—hug the cactus.”
Sons of Detroit is now beginning its festival run and theatrical rollout. If early reactions are any indication, Jeremy Xido’s long-delayed homecoming may end up sparking conversations—and reconciliations—far beyond the city limits of Detroit.
