A documentary about Mississippi examines competing forces: the nostalgic celebration of the old south and the refusal to sanitize the brutal history of enslavement

“Natchez swallowed a master narrative about the old south.”

In Suzannah Herbert’s documentary Natchez, the opening remark from National Park Service ranger Barney Schoby functions as both diagnosis and thesis. The film that follows does not evade the Mississippi town’s contradictions. Instead, it actively adjudicates them, staging white people’s curated nostalgia against Black people’s historical knowledge, lived experience and institutional fact.