Park City Film spotlights America250 with local documentary series

Park City Film will open its America the Beautiful Series June 26-28 at the Jim Santy Auditorium, using four documentaries to turn the run-up to America250 into a local conversation about race, memory and place. The series is part of Park City Film’s first summer film program in its 32-year history and comes as the nonprofit expands year-round programming in response to Sundance’s departure from Park City.

Friday’s screening centers on Natchez, scheduled for 7 p.m. June 26 at the Park City Library venue, with a Q&A afterward with director Suzannah Herbert. The documentary won Best Documentary at its 2025 Tribeca Festival premiere, has since collected 19 awards on the festival circuit, and was named one of the National Board of Review’s top five documentaries of 2025. Its subject, the Mississippi city of Natchez, carries the contradictions that make the series timely for Summit County audiences: a tourist economy built around heritage while the town also remained tied to slavery and the Confederacy. The film also reaches into Reconstruction history, when Robert H. Wood served as Natchez’s first Black mayor from 1870 to 1871 and Hiram Rhodes Revels, who had ties to Natchez and Mississippi, became the first African American to serve in Congress in 1870.

Saturday’s lineup includes Remaining Native, which follows Ku Stevens, a 17-year-old Native American runner, as he pursues collegiate athletics while tracing his great-grandfather’s 50-mile escape from an Indian boarding school. That story shifts the series from Southern history to the American West and the legacy of Native boarding schools, a subject with direct resonance in a region that markets itself around outdoor culture, heritage tourism and western identity. Park City Film has said the series is meant to celebrate the diversity of the American experience on the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

The full series includes four documentaries, with Third Act also listed in local coverage and Give Me the Ball closing the weekend with Summit Pride. Park City Film says the Jim Santy Auditorium is its home base for the series, a 424-seat theater-style space on the third floor of the Park City Library that Visit Park City describes as a 400-seat auditorium in the historic former high school. For Summit County, the venue choice matters as much as the films: it puts the discussion inside a public library rather than a resort or private club, and it gives local audiences a place to confront the country’s history through stories that connect national identity to the mountains, towns and institutions where people live now.