Fri, Mar 20 at 7:15pm: Post-screening discussion with director Suzannah Herbert, moderated by poet, professor and essayist Caroline Randall Williams | BUY TICKETS
Additional showtimes will be posted on Mon, Mar 16
Natchez, Mississippi: a town of 15,000 that, for generations, has drawn tourists to its immaculately restored antebellum mansions, some hosted by hoop-skirted white matriarchs, for an experience dubbed “Pilgrimage.” As interest declines and questions arise about showcasing these regal estates with tall tales of the “Old South,” Natchez faces a reckoning — with a romanticized, sanitized historical narrative and the debt it owes to the descendants of slaves. Directed by Suzannah Herbert — a Memphis-born documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on the American South — NATCHEZ follows owners of historic plantations, local activists and politicians — and both white and African American tour guides — as they tell their ever-more conflicting versions of the town’s past, and of American history.
“NATCHEZ is less about the individuals and more about the histories they’re part of and the way they crash into one another. The real story is never what you see on the surface…. Maybe telling the whole story doesn’t mean living happily ever after, but at least it can mean being a little wiser.” —Alissa Wilkinson, New York Times “The documentary puts personalities to ideas; it teems with notable characters, spanning a range from righteous to indifferent to ignoble, who excel at speaking their minds and expressing their emotions when a camera is pointed at them.” —Richard Brody, New Yorker
About the Speakers:
Suzannah Herbert is a filmmaker from Memphis whose work focuses on the American South. Herbert’s directorial debut WRESTLE (Oscilloscope/Independent Lens) was nominated for two News & Documentary Emmy awards and named one of the top five documentaries of 2019 by the National Board of Review. WRESTLE was lauded as “superb” by the Los Angeles Times and hailed a New York Times Critic’s Pick. Herbert has collaborated as an editor on Bob Dylan projects and edited Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga’s Grammy-nominated music video, “I Get a Kick Out of You.” Herbert’s sophomore feature NATCHEZ has been honored with 18 awards on the festival circuit. NATCHEZ was named one of the top five documentaries of 2025 by the National Board of Review and will be released theatrically by Oscilloscope Laboratories and broadcast on PBS’s Independent Lens in 2026.
Caroline Randall Williams is a multi-genre writer, educator, performance artist in Nashville, Tennessee, where she is a Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University. Host of the Viola Davis produced Discovery+ series Hungry For Answers, she is also co-author of the NAACP Image Award-winning cookbook Soul Food Love. Her debut poetry collection, Lucy Negro, Redux was published by Third Man Books, and turned into a ballet by Nashville Ballet, with an original score by Grammy award winner Rhiannon Giddens. This production was filmed for PBS’s Great Performances 50th anniversary series, in which Williams performs her poetry as a member of the cast. Named by Southern Living as “One of the 50 People Changing the South,” ranked by The Root as one of the 100 most influential African Americans of 2020, and by Nashville Business Journal’s 2025 class of 40 under 40, the Cave Canem fellow can be heard occasionally offering her two cents on MSNBC, and has been published and featured in multiple journals, essay collections and news outlets, including The Atlantic, Garden and Gun, Essence, and the New York Times.
