Filmmaker Suzannah Herbert’s worldview was shaped by growing up in Memphis. The daughter of prominent artist Pinkney Herbert, she went to Snowden and Central High School. “I’m very passionate about telling Southern stories,” she says. “That’s where my heart is.
“I had finished my first film, Wrestle, when I was invited to a wedding on a plantation. I was taken aback by it, and started to question how people use sites of such trauma today for their own enjoyment, their own pleasure and profit, and what that means to our society, and how it affects people on an individual level. I wanted to understand it, but also interrogate that practice and what we do with history in this country today.”
A research road trip through Mississippi led her to Natchez, a Delta city where sprawling antebellum mansions have become the city’s major tourist attraction and economic lifeline. But those mansions were built there because Natchez was a major slave market, where imported African workers were sold to plantation owners after being marched across the South. “It was the first time I’d ever been there, and I was just so struck by how beautiful it was. But there was also this underlying tension and pain. It was very visceral. I realized that a community grappling with their history was actually kind of the perfect place to explore the themes I wanted to explore, in terms of how we remember our past and how it affects us today.”
Before she started filming, Herbert immersed herself in the town of 15,000. “I spent probably a total of a month and a half there. I got to meet people. I went to cocktail parties. I walked on the bluff and just started introducing myself. People would say, ‘Oh, you should talk to this person. Come and have brunch tomorrow, we’re having people over.’”
Rev. Collins leads a tour of the former slave market. (Photo: Noah Collier)
One of the people she met was Tracy “Rev” Collins, a Black pastor and guide whose van tours emphasize the hidden history of slavery in Mississippi. “I met him at the visitor center. He recruited me into his van, just like he recruits the Southern Belles in the movie,” Herbert recalls. I was really blown away by his tour and the history that he was telling. It was so different than what I was experiencing in the antebellum homes. I knew immediately that, if he was willing, he would be an incredible collaborator and participant in the film.”
Financed through ITVS, Herbert and her crew spent 75 days filming in Natchez. Her film is a stirring, complex portrait of a city where, as Faulkner put it, the past is not even past.
Immersive, fly-on-the-wall documentaries like Herbert’s are increasingly rare in the age of the generic Netflix true-crime documentary. “The terrifying thing that’s happened in the last year is that Congress and the Trump administration have completely defunded PBS and public media,” Herbert says. “The funds that made this one possible are no longer in existence at ITVS.”
After a successful festival run, Natchez is being distributed by Oscilloscope Laboratories. Herbert will bring Natchez back to her hometown with two screenings at Crosstown Theater. On Thursday, Feb. 19th, filmmaker Craig Brewer will moderate a Q&A with Herbert and Bridges CEO Sam O’Bryant. On Feb. 20th, Herbert and Brewer will be joined at Crosstown by National Civil Rights Museum President Dr. Russ Wigginton. Natchez is also opening at Malco Ridgeway on Feb. 20th for a week-long run. The Feb. 21st screening will be a benefit for the newly revived Indie Memphis Film Festival.
“We’ve opened in Atlanta, New York and L.A., and we’ve done extremely well,” says Herbert. “So many sold out shows, not to mention all the festivals we’ve played in. Our shows were packed. They were turning people away. People are hungry for this type of art, this type of film, and the conversations that it inspires.”