Premieres Monday, May 11, 2026 at 10 p.m. on KPBS TV / Stream with KPBS+
Winner of the Best Documentary Feature at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival and named one of the National Board of Review’s Top Five Documentaries of the Year, “Natchez” will premiere on PBS’s INDEPENDENT LENS.
From director Suzannah Herbert, a Memphis-born documentary filmmaker, the character-driven “Natchez” captures an unsettling clash between history and memory in a small Mississippi town reliant on antebellum tourism to survive. For generations, Natchez, Mississippi, has marketed an idyllic vision of the Old South. Now, the town is reckoning with a romanticized past, an uncertain future, and its responsibility towards the descendants of enslaved people.
An exploration of a tourist town at a crossroads, “Natchez” immerses viewers in the lives of an array of historic homeowners, activists, and tour guides (whose livelihoods depend on its carefully curated past) caught between preserving tradition and confronting the realities buried beneath it.
What begins as a portrait of a charming Southern tourist destination slowly reveals deeper fault lines. With moments that are tense, darkly humorous, and unexpectedly intimate, Herbert’s film becomes something more unsettling and urgent: a window into the ongoing struggle over who has the right to share America’s story.
Rev, a preacher, former county commissioner, and full-time tour guide, leads visitors through the city’s overlooked history of enslavement, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. Tracy, who performs as a “Southern belle” for Garden Club mansion tours, navigates the emotional dissonance between the romantic fantasy she embodies and the realities unfolding in her own life.
David opens the doors of his meticulously preserved antebellum home, sharing stories of inherited china and family lineage. Debbie, the first Black member of the Pilgrimage Garden Club, invites guests into her bed-and-breakfast, a former slave dwelling where the past feels impossible to ignore. Together, these Natchezians are performers, historians, and witnesses, each grappling with how their community tells its story, and who gets to tell it.
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Credits: Suzannah Herbert, Producer/Director. Darcy McKinnon, Producer. Executive Producers: Carrie Lozano and Lois Vossen.
