In a small Mississippi town, a multigenerational and multiracial community comes together to confront a history many long tried to forget. Collective Memory follows the Lafayette Community Remembrance Project as its members unearth the buried legacy of racial terror, most notably the 1935 lynching of Elwood Higginbottom, and work to restore truth, dignity, and public acknowledgment where silence once stood.
Through intimate interviews, quiet moments of reflection, soil collection rituals, and the unveiling of historical markers, the film captures an unfolding journey of reckoning. Community members and descendants of lynching victims piece together archival evidence, share personal stories, and challenge the sanitized narratives that have shaped local memory for generations.
What begins as a search for historical accuracy becomes a profound act of repair. As the group reads names aloud, gathers soil at lynching sites, and stands together in collective remembrance, they transform grief into action and memory into a catalyst for healing. Rooted in the Black South and guided by deep place-based storytelling, Collective Memory is a testament to what becomes possible when ordinary people choose truth over silence and community over erasure.
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