Director Suzannah Herbert’s documentary Natchez, which counts Sam Pollard among its executive producers and won this year’s Documentary Competition at the Tribeca Film Festival, 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.
Director of photography Noah Collier captures Natchez, the documentary’s setting and subject, with a hazy, sunbaked glow — which, in its subtle contrast with Herbert’s rigorous, near-anthropological approach, echoes one of the film’s main thematic threads in its very form: the tourism economy of Natchez has long presented the historic town as a beautiful escape from the harsh present, a seductive and lucrative dream that encourages people to look away from its more complicated, often brutal past. Natchez, pre-Civil War, was a hub for the cotton industry and had the most millionaires per capita in the United States. Throughout the 20th century, with diminished wealth but an array of well-appointed historical mansions, Natchez re-oriented its economy toward tourism, with its prominent Garden Club giving tours on twice-yearly “pilgrimages” that emphasize the luxury and beauty of wealthy Antebellum lifestyles, while papering over the economy of human trafficking and forced labor that propped it up.
Herbert, filming in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2020 mass protests for racial justice, finds Natchez at an economic and cultural crossroads: tourism is diminished, with millennials and Gen Z uninterested in revisionist Antebellum history, and the town’s Black community and the National Park Service are in the midst of a long, frustrating process to change the local narrative of history to more meaningfully incorporate the facts of slavery — even as the Garden Club tour guides, mostly women who lead their tours in full hoopskirts, seem more interested in continuing to highlight the mansions’ beautiful furnishings and inaccurately describe slaves as “servants.”
Herbert follows numerous subjects from Natchez to paint a complex community portrait. Perhaps the most prominently featured is Tracy “Rev” Collins, a Black pastor from a neighboring county who gives tours of Natchez that emphasize the history of slavery. Herbert presents a generous amount of footage from these tours, and the charismatic and erudite Rev — with his accuracy and rigor in delineating the histories of slavery, reconstruction, and Jim Crow in Natchez — becomes our de facto tour guide as well. National Park Service rangers and Deborah Cosey, the first African American member of the Garden Club who gives tours of the former slave quarters she lives in, are also highlighted as effective stewards for the experiences of enslaved people in Natchez. The white Garden Club members’ mansion tours are given plenty of screen time as well, but Herbert homes in most on the inaccuracies and elisions of their tours, some of which tip into blatant racism. Herbert and editor Pablo Proenza effectively use montages of repeated phrases and themes between tours to emphasize the common false narratives perpetuated among the traditional Garden Club tours, and they also frequently juxtapose these revisionist presentations against the direct honesty of tour guides like Collins and Cosey.
Herbert takes care to capture the town and its residents accurately and with all their attendant complexities. Natchez cannot be simply boiled down to a backward-looking town that needs to adapt or die; it is referred to repeatedly as a “blue dot” in a red state, and it was the first town in Mississippi to elect an openly gay mayor. The town’s current mayor, Dan Gibson, is portrayed as a unifying, forward-looking civic leader — a key scene shows him presenting Cosey with a key to the city — yet the obviously more conservative Garden Club is a cultural and economic power center.
In a culminating sequence late in the film, Herbert captures the contradictions inherent in Natchez’s white population, specifically, to startling effect. Tracy McCartney, a white Garden Club member who has recently divorced her wealthy husband, takes Rev’s tour, and is empathetic and attentive to his stories about the brutality of the slave trade in Natchez. Herbert intersperses this scene with David Garner, a prominent figure of the local gay society who has lately been struggling to give tours of his home due to Parkinson’s disease, delivering an unprompted racist tirade directly to camera. Herbert has portrayed these two subjects as largely sympathetic, though ambiguous, figures up to this point, and her ultimate juxtaposition of them is coldly revealing: In pushing past the pleasant veneer of revisionist history accepted by the white population for generations, one might find in any individual either a reasonable willingness to learn the truth, or unbridled, hateful racial animus.
The question that ultimately lingers at Natchez’s conclusion is whether the white arbiters of Natchez’s cultural heritage will accept the factual history — and still-lingering problems — of their town, or content themselves to continue retreating into the fanciful, morally corrosive fictions they were raised on and have profited from, despite the largely Black community members’ efforts to preserve and commemorate their town’s full history. This question, of course, is as relevant nationally as it is locally, particularly in the protracted period of racist backlash American society is currently festering in. 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.
Published as part of Tribeca Film Festival ’25 — Dispatch 3.
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