Natchez, Mississippi: a town of 15,000 for generations has drawn tourists to its immaculately restored antebellum mansions, hosted by hoop-skirted white matriarchs, for an experience dubbed “Pilgrimage.” As interest declines in and questions arise about showcasing these regal estates with tall tales of the “Old South,” Natchez faces a reckoning—with a romanticized, sanitized historical narrative and the debt it owes to the descendants of enslaved people.
Directed by Suzannah Herbert—a documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on the American South—NATCHEZ follows owners of historic plantations, local activists and politicians, and both white and African American tour guides as they tell their ever-more conflicting versions of the town’s past, and of American history.
NATCHEZ had its world premiere at the 2025 Tribeca Festival where it was awarded the prize for Best Documentary and Special Jury Awards for cinematography (Noah Collier) and editing (Pablo Proenza). It was also featured at Charlotte Film Festival (Winner: Documentary Feature Audience Award), Philadelphia Film Festival (Winner: Best Documentary Feature), and more. NATCHEZ was named one of the Top 5 Documentaries of the Year by the National Board of Review and was awarded for Best Editing at the International Documentary Association IDA Awards.
Executive Producer Sam Pollard has been called one of “cinema’s most dedicated chroniclers of the Black experience in America.” He has collaborated with Spike Lee since 1990, editing and co-producing a number of Lee’s films. Pollard has directed and produced SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME (PBS), AUGUST WILSON: THE GROUND ON WHICH I STAND (American Masters), TWO TRAINS RUNNIN ’(American Masters), and more. His 2020 film MLK/FBI (IFC Films) was shortlisted for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Darcy McKinnon is a documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on the American South and the Caribbean. Recently released projects include A KING LIKE ME and ROLEPLAY, premiering at SXSW 2024, COMMUTED (PBS, 2024), ALGIERS, AMERICA (Hulu, 2023), UNDER G-D (Sundance 2023), LOOK AT ME! XXXTENTACION (SXSW, Hulu, 2022) and THE NEUTRAL GROUND (Tribeca, POV, 2021), recipient of LEH Documentary of the Year 2022. Darcy is an alum of the Impact Partners Producing Fellowship and the Sundance Institute Creative Producing Fellowship, and a recipient of American Documentary’s Creative Visionary Award in 2023.
“Raises urgent questions…. The genteel politeness on display at the start of the film falls away, revealing an unsettling core. How can a city move forward without acknowledging the past? That’s not just a question for Natchez, but one for America as a whole.”
– Lovia Gyarke, The Hollywood Reporter
“A tough and complex depiction of intractable racism…Thanks to the discerning eyes of Herbert and cinematographer Noah Collier, we see hypocrisy leak from the faces of their subjects, exactly as it does from the faces of the actors in Jordan Peele’s GET OUT. But NATCHEZ is not a horror film. Rather, it depicts the contest between two versions of history, the stakes of which are the American present and its possible future.”
– Amy Taubin, Film Comment
“Captures the contradictions and tensions of a small Mississippi town reliant on Antebellum tourism with polyphonic complexity. Its implications broaden as its focus grows ever more specific, and in Herbert’s humanistic yet uncompromising direction, Natchez emerges as a microcosm of how the violent white supremacy embedded in the founding of the United States continues to infect the present. In her probing and critical, yet invariably empathetic, interrogation of this tension in the unsettled community of Natchez, Herbert has crafted a major achievement in documentary filmmaking.”
– Robert Stinner, In Review Online
Presented with support from The Richard Brick, Geri Ashur, and Sara Bershtel Fund for Social Justice Documentaries and The Endowed Fund for Emerging Filmmakers.
the WORD Editor Gregg W. Morris