White Flight tells the history of the Black-Power movement in the USA. The film was shot in Detroit, a city that in the immediate post-war years embodied the flagship of American industry and was home to an ever-stronger black middle class.

By the late 1960s Detroit had become the scene of the worst racial unrest in the history of the United States. Large sections of the city were destroyed in violent clashes between military forces and the black population. The flight of the white population to the suburbs—hence the title: White Flight—was accompanied by the rapid deterioration of downtown areas. In 1968, Mats Hjelm’s father Lars, a renowned documentary filmmaker and journalist, filmed the racial unrest in Detroit and some of the protagonists of the Black Panther. Thirty years later, Mats Hjelm revisited his father’s journey.

White Flight combines historical black-and-white documentary material from the sixties with newly filmed color footage depicting some of the same places and sometimes also the protagonists from back then. The result is an incisive preoccupation with the question as to how the past continues to have an effect on the present—or is possibly also lost forever. At the same time, White Flight is Hjelm’s way of artistically taking leave from his father who died in 1996. It is an attempt to approach a man whose images were omnipresent in the media but who as a result of his profession was hardly ever at home.