“Natchez”: Confronting the Deep South’s Past

Written by Alexa LoSchiavo. Photo by Avery Melhado. 

“Natchez,” a film by Suzannah Herbert, has won seven awards in various film festivals, including the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival Best Documentary Feature. If you watch one documentary in your life, it should be this one. 

“If we do not confront our past, we’re never going to create equity,” Suzannah Herbert, the director of “Natchez,” says after her film’s credits have rolled through. Confronting the deep South’s bloody and racist past is a lofty goal, but Herbert is able to not only confront but also uncover deep truths about the corrosiveness of upholding false narratives on slavery and segregation in her study of Natchez, a town in Miss.. 

“Natchez” opens by letting you into a life that mirrors the aristocracy of the Deep South, showing homes built by slaves that are now celebrated for their beauty. Herbert takes you through her journey through the city, confronting the beauty and pain that are juxtaposed all over this town. We meet the people that she met and hear their different perspectives on this town’s jagged history. 

We meet Tracy, a “lady of the antebellum” who dresses in hoopskirts, and the ladies of the garden club who give tours of their houses upheld in the old stylistic glamour that the wealthy white aristocrats built off the backs of enslaved people. We meet Rev, a tour guide and Reverend (hence the name), who takes people who visit Natchez on a comprehensive tour of the city (comprehensive meaning a tour which tells the whole truth). He takes people to the big beautiful houses and also the Forks of the Road, the second largest domestic slave market, and lets the chains in the ground speak for themselves. He speaks for voices that are covered up in a town that profits off mythological narratives of the South, telling the tours that the enslaved persons who built the city walked 900 miles to be traded and worked until they died. 

It’s a sharp contrast from the crystalline and beautiful houses of the antebellum, but it’s the truth. In this film, Herbert gives voice to all people who consider Natchez home, and she uses these voices to create a nuanced and beautiful documentary that exposes the false narratives of Natchez. 

Herbert centers around the people of this town, letting them tell their stories, expose themselves, letting harsh moments sit in silence and with all of us. We see that the people living inside the past in these big houses are actively complicit in systemic racism and inequity. Most importantly, we see that telling the true story, however graphic, however bloody, is necessary in order to have equity and justice in our society. This documentary is, now more than ever, incredibly important because it shows the power that sharing oppressed voices and histories has in undoing years and years of inequity. 

After the movie is over, Herbert talks more about the importance of confronting our past because we need to have “introspection in our own complicities in erasures of history.” Sharing knowledge and understanding the ways oppression manifests in society, even now, opens doors for equity to follow. She says that “it is important right now to give voice to the voiceless, especially when the powers that be are trying to silence history.” Watching this documentary gives insight into the ways oppression and systemic racism function in our society and the importance of sharing that knowledge with others. 

This documentary was beautifully done and incredibly powerful, and you can see it too, in wider theatres in Feb. and on PBS in May. Herbert gives voice to the pervasive topic of how oppression functions in society and calls forth a powerful question: What can we do about it?