POINTS NORTH PRESENTS Series
Once home to more millionaires per capita than any other city in America, Natchez, Mississippi, now survives on a unique and problematic cottage industry: antebellum tourism.
The film embeds itself within the town’s social fabric, following a cast of residents: from the charismatic Mayor Dan Gibson, who attempts to bridge the city’s racial divide, to Tracy, a “Southern belle” who proudly preserves the pageantry of the Old South, and “Rev” Collins, a Black preacher who leads unsparing “truth tours” to correct the sanitized white-washed narrative.
Through gauzy, cinematic cinematography, director Suzannah Herbert reveals a community struggling to maintain its economic lifeblood—the romanticized myth of the plantation—while facing an inevitable reckoning with the descendants of the enslaved people who built that very wealth. The film culminates in a powerful exploration of “historical grammar,” asking if a town can ever truly move forward while its identity is so deeply tethered to a troubling fantasy.
NR | USA | 2025 | 1h 26m
Directed by Suzannah Herbert
This screening will be followed by a community conversation hosted by Meadow Dibble of ATLANTIC BLACK BOX
Winner – Best Documentary Feature, 2025 Tribeca Film Festival
Winner – Best Documentary Award 2026 Palm Springs International Film Festival
Named one of the Top 5 Documentaries of the Year, National Board of Review
“A visually striking work that aims to entertain while provoking thought on how history, culture, and racism are packaged for the modern world.”
– Sundance Jury Citation
“A stunning… wide-ranging mosaic of cinematic portraiture that captures a place where the past isn’t just a memory, but a commodity.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker
ABOUT ATLANTIC BLACK BOX
Through collaborative research, place-based education programs, digital humanities projects, events, and advocacy, The Atlantic Black Box Project seeks to engage the public in the collective rewriting of our regional history.
Together, we ask: Why have we been telling certain stories about New England and not others? How did we come to unknow the region’s deep complicity in the institution of slavery and systems of oppression? As we work to recover this repressed knowledge, what concrete actions in the present might its acknowledgement recommend or require? How does this seemingly remote history relate to our current national conversations about race, privilege, identity, and access to the “American dream”?
ABOUT POINTS NORTH PRESENTS
Points North Presents is a monthly screening series that extends the spirit of the Camden International Film Festival throughout the year. In collaboration with the Strand Theatre, we’re bringing some of the world’s most exciting and thought-provoking documentary films and filmmakers to the Midcoast Maine community.
On the fourth Thursday of March, April and May, we will gather in the historic Strand to share unforgettable films and the conversations they spark. Each screening will be followed by a lively Q&A discussion — often with the filmmaker in attendance!
