When she was invited to a plantation wedding in 2017, director Suzannah Herbert found the idea for her next project.
Herbert’s documentary “Natchez” examines the titular Mississippi town, known for its Antebellum tourism, that has split residents over the history and legacy of slavery.
“Natchez” premiered at the Tribeca Festival earlier this year and opens Nov. 7 at the Tara Theatre for a week-long Oscar-qualifying run. Herbert and producer Darcy McKinnon will be doing Q&As after certain screenings over the weekend and on Monday. Rough Draft Atlanta recently spoke to Herbert over Zoom.
Attending that 2017 wedding opened Herbert’s eyes to modern uses of plantations.
“It made me think about how today, people use plantations or historic sites [for] their own enjoyment or entertainment, even profit, and what that means to society and how that affects us as individuals and communities as a whole,” she said.
After the wedding, Herbert took a road trip with her mother. They started in Memphis, but a lot of Mississippi friends told Herbert she should go to Natchez. The community was currently grappling with questions about whose history is told and how.
In Natchez, Herbert found a town full of contradictions.
“Natchez is a really interesting place where they have been selling the myths of the Old South through Antebellum tourism for the last 100 years,” she said. “They have been reliant on Antebellum tourism for their economy, and that is complicated in and of itself. I think there are people there in Natchez who are trying to tell a different story about the past, and we follow those people.”
Despite the town’s Antebellum tourism, politically, Natchez is a blue speck in a sea of red.
“There are a lot of progressive politics and people there, but at the same time, the economic structures that are there do at times promote a whitewashing of history,” Herbert said.
The film features a rich array of subjects. There’s Tracy “Rev” Collins, a local who provides historical tours; Deborah “Debbie” Cosey, a Black garden club member; and Tracy McCartney, a Southern Belle who challenges traditional narratives about history.
Herbert was initially worried about overwhelming the audience with too many characters, but her editor Pablo Proenza was able to distill the essence of each person.
“We took a lot of inspiration from Robert Altman’s ‘Nashville’ and we knew it was going to be a big cast, but we wanted to focus on our main characters,” Herbert said. “Rev’s tour is the structure of the film – he carries us through history with the stories he is telling. I met Rev at the visitor’s center and he recruited me onto his van like he does most people. I was blown away by the tour and the history he told.”
Most of the people who take Rev’s tour are middle-aged to older white people who may not know the history of Natchez, and just want to see the area’s beautiful homes. During his tours, Rev, who is also a preacher, escorts patrons from location to location and fills them in on the town’s history, including its bout with slavery. By the end of Rev’s tour, patrons usually want to hear more, Herbert said.
“It’s also a testament to Rev and his ability to make people comfortable and bring people along with humor and grace,” Herbert said. “When he gets to the harsher parts of American history, people are more accepting and willing and open to hearing it, and that’s also what we wanted to do with the film. We mirrored Rev’s approach – showing the beauty but also peeling back the layers to the harsher realities.”
For Herbert, it was vital to subvert stereotypes. She wanted to show that people contain multitudes and can be more than one thing.
“Most people would not expect there to be a drag show in the middle of Natchez,” Herbert said. “A lot of people wouldn’t expect Debbie, a Black woman, to be a member of a garden club and to have her house featured in the garden club’s line-up. Or that Tracy, who is our Southern Belle with the hoop skirt, to go on Rev’s tour and have her mind opened up to a bigger version of history.”
While making the film came with great joy, there were also harsher moments. Towards the end of the documentary one of the subjects – David Garner, a mansion owner – expresses blatant and disturbing racism. It’s a jolting moment. Herbert said the moment was upsetting, but not necessarily shocking given the myths that exist about a place like Natchez.
“There are places all across the country that rely on the myths of the Old South,” she said. “I feel like that mythology is pretty corrosive. If you are only telling the white dominant version of that history, it can be corrosive personally, to society. [What was said] was not shocking, but it was upsetting.”
Herbert began her research for the film in 2018 and shot it from 2022-2024. Ten months of editing followed. The film will open wide early next year and will appear on the PBS program Independent Lens in the spring of 2026. For Herbert, who never wanted to point a finger at the South, the warm reaction across the country has been especially rewarding.
