A documentary that won the best documentary feature award at the 2025 Tribeca film festival has laid bare the tensions between nostalgic celebration of the old south and the brutal history of enslavement in Natchez, Mississippi. Suzannah Herbert's film, simply titled Natchez, embeds itself in the town's rhythms, following residents whose lives intersect through tourism, preservation and activism.
The film opens with a remark from National Park Service ranger Barney Schoby, which sets the tone for an examination of how the town's public life and economic survival remain tethered to a carefully managed historical fantasy. Herbert shows that this fantasy is not merely local or touristic but is cinematic, drawing on the plantation myth endlessly recycled and monetised.
Central to the documentary is the Pilgrimage Garden Club, which offers antebellum tours and events sustaining the local economy. White homeowners dress in period garb and narrate a version of the past that foregrounds elegance and lineage whilst relegating slavery to euphemism or omission. Herbert does not frame these tours as aberrations but as the logical extension of a fantasy rehearsed on film for over a century.
Herbert makes this cinematic inheritance palpable through Tracy McCartney, a white volunteer tour guide at Choctaw Hall, a former plantation bed and breakfast. Dressed in a 19th-century hoop skirt and bonnet, McCartney performs a southern belle persona that evokes Scarlett O'Hara from Gone With the Wind. The image crystallises the film's argument that plantation tourism functions as a cinematic genre as much as a geographic reality.
Shot over roughly one hundred days from 2022 to 2024, the film stages white people's curated nostalgia against Black people's historical knowledge and lived experience. The result is a town portrait composed through people who function as living archives of competing histories, revealing how historic sites are used for leisure and romance whilst enabling the strategic erasure of slavery's centrality to American life.
