“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.
The result is a revelation of how Natchez’s public life and economic survival remain tethered to a carefully managed historical fantasy. That fantasy, Herbert shows, is not simply local or touristic. It is cinematic. It is the plantation myth, endlessly recycled, aestheticized and monetized both on screen and in social life, as it refuses to account for the violence of slavery that made it possible.
Winner of the best documentary feature award at the 2025 Tribeca film festival, Natchez is a film about antebellum tourism, but it is also about how American cinema has trained audiences to recognize the old south as spectacle rather than system. (The film is showing in select theaters nationwide through March 2026.) The town’s preserved mansions and its costumed tours do not merely reference history; they re-enact a visual grammar that has circulated for more than a century. Herbert’s intervention lies in making that grammar visible, then placing it in direct confrontation with counter-narratives that refuse nostalgia’s terms.
Herbert began researching Natchez in 2018 while examining contemporary plantation economies tied to weddings and heritage tourism. What emerged was her broader inquiry into how historic sites are used as spaces of leisure, romance and escape, and how, in the process, they enable the strategic erasure or softening of slavery’s centrality to American life, past and present. Shot over roughly one hundred days from 2022 to 2024, Natchez embeds itself in the town’s rhythms, following residents whose lives intersect through tourism, preservation and activism. The result is not a sociological overview but a town portrait composed through people who function as living archives of competing histories.
In Natchez, tourism operates as performance. Nowhere is this clearer than with the Pilgrimage Garden Club, which offers an antebellum tour and event service that sustains the town’s economy. White homeowners dress in period garb, open their homes to visitors and narrate a version of the past that foregrounds elegance, lineage and architectural beauty while relegating slavery to euphemism or omission. Herbert does not frame these tours as aberrations. She presents them as the logical extension of a fantasy long rehearsed on the silver screen and, in doing so, we see the schism between trope and truth. By pulling back the curtain on familiar archetypes like the southern belle and gentleman, Herbert shrewdly exposes the south as a genre as much as it is a geography.
American film history is inseparable from the plantation myth. Edwin S Porter’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903) introduced plantation iconography to early cinema while hollowing out the novel’s abolitionist critique. DW Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) perfected classical Hollywood technique in service of white supremacist fantasy, staging the Ku Klux Klan as heroic defenders of southern order. Gone With the Wind (1939) then canonized the plantation as technicolor spectacle, transforming enslavement into backdrop and elevating the “big house” into a national monument. These films matter in Natchez not as references but as templates – visual and narrative structures that continue to organize how the old south is performed for tourists.
Herbert makes this cinematic inheritance palpable through Tracy McCartney, a white volunteer tour guide at Choctaw Hall, a bed and breakfast located on a former plantation. Dressed in a 19th-century hoop skirt and bonnet, McCartney greets visitors in character, performing a southern belle persona that feels instantly recognizable. Herbert films McCartney walking through the town at sunset, her blue dress catching the fading light, an image unmistakably evoking Scarlett O’Hara’s silhouette against the backdrop of Tara, the plantation at the heart of Gone With the Wind. The moment crystallizes the film’s argument that plantation tourism functions not just as a myth of southern grandeur but as a form of cinematic re-enactment. McCartney is not merely playing dress-up; she is inhabiting a role shaped by decades of filmic representation.
Visitors are invited to step into a world they already know, a world where history is legible as romance, tragedy and refinement, and where slavery is abstracted beyond recognition. One can walk through history during these tours, Natchez suggests, without ever having to live with its consequences. As one tourist remarks while sipping drinks on a mansion’s porch, the pilgrimage offers a way to escape the present, to “pick and choose” what to think about. Herbert frames this not as naivety but as a philosophy of selective memory, a white nostalgia that functions as retreat and refusal at the same time.
Herbert’s camera resists this fantasy by turning away from spectacle and toward detail. While Noah Collier’s cinematography captures Natchez’s external splendor – its trees, river views and stately facades – the film’s most unsettling images are found inside the homes. Alongside heirloom furniture and ornate decor are the material traces of slavery embedded in everyday objects: bells used to summon enslaved people, references to “servants” that sanitize bondage and, most disturbingly, decorative Black figurines scattered throughout the rooms.
If these objects register the plantation myth’s desire for silent witnesses, the film’s Black interlocutors refuse that silence altogether. Nowhere is the tension between fantasy and fact more explicit than in the sequences featuring David Garner, the elderly white owner of the Choctaw Hall. Garner performs the role of the southern aristocratic gentleman but his virulent racism is no performance. Charismatic, theatrical and unapologetically offensive, Garner uses racist slurs casually, framing cruelty as historical truth while guests laugh along. Herbert does not interrupt or editorialize. Instead, she observes how racism circulates as entertainment, how laughter becomes complicity and how heritage tourism creates a space in which violence can be repackaged as authenticity.
The effect is jarring and too easily moved past. The comfort white residents and tourists display toward Herbert’s camera – perhaps trusting that she, as a white woman, will understand or protect their perspective – remains mostly unexamined. Garner’s explicit racism, revealed at the film’s climax, feels belated, an overdue indictment of a man presented as a complex avatar of “heritage, not hate” despite the hate being visible all along. Garner is not an outlier but a condensation of the town’s contradictions: progress and regression, charm and cruelty coexisting without resolution.
Against this cinematic-touristic fantasy, Natchez offers counter-tours that insist on historical specificity. In contrast with Garner’s performance, Tracy “Rev” Collins leads van tours that refuse nostalgia altogether. A pastor and gifted storyteller, Rev, who is Black, guides visitors through Natchez’s prominent rise under slavery, its transformation during Reconstruction and its violent backlash under Jim Crow. History, in his telling, is not set-dressing but structure, something that organizes the present whether acknowledged or not.
Herbert also follows activist Ser Clifford Boxley and National Park Service employees working to preserve Forks of the Road, the second-largest domestic slave market in US history. Long neglected and nearly erased, the site stands as a stark counter-monument to the mansions celebrated during the pilgrimages. Preservation here is not about beauty or romance but about acknowledgment and reckoning.
Deborah Cosey’s story deepens this counter-narrative. The first Black woman admitted as a member to the garden club and the owner of the Concord plantation, Cosey occupies a singular position within the pilgrimage structure. She gives tours of her home – formerly slave quarters – while navigating interactions with white plantation homeowners unwilling to confront the implications of their historical cosplay.
In a quietly devastating scene, Cosey describes the emotional toll of listening politely to an out-of-touch fellow homeowner use language that diminishes Cosey’s history, revealing only in private the depth of her hurt. It is after the encounter has ended and once the performance of civility is no longer required that she finally says: “Bless her heart,” a phrase that in southern vernacular signals not sympathy but admonishment. Inclusion, Herbert makes clear, is not the same as transformation.
What Natchez ultimately exposes is not simply the co-existence of competing narratives, but the unequal power that governs them. Visitors can choose which tour to take. They can walk through mansions and never visit Forks of the Road. They can indulge the cinematic fantasy without confronting its costs. Herbert offers no illusion that historical truth will automatically override myth.
In the end, Natchez is a film about historical preservation, but not as heritage tourism performs it nor as contemporary forces seek to own or erase it. The grand homes may crumble. The gardens may rot. What endures are the people who carry history in their bodies, their speech and their refusals. Against the plantation’s cinematic monumentality – columns, costumes and spectacle – Herbert proposes another kind of monument: living witnesses whose presence refuses fantasy’s comfort and insists on history’s weight through the labor of speaking truth to power one tour at a time.