Heritage is a road trip down some of American history’s strangest and most infamous paths. Director Samuel Crow explores his family history and the concept of regional identity and what keeping or renouncing it might mean.

Shortly before his passing, New Yorker magazine editor C.P. “Pat” Crow reconnected with his brother, Jay Crow, breaking a decades-long estrangement. Jay’s visit to his brother’s home in upstate New York led to a new relationship with his nephew, Pat’s son, writer-director Samuel Crow, and opened the door to a branch of relatives – and their dark histories – Sam never knew about. 

Sam’s great-uncle Johnny, one of a generation of Arkansas sharecroppers and railroad workers, spent World War II as a farm manager at the Tule Lake Japanese Segregation Camp – known as the harshest camp for the allegedly least cooperative prisoners. 

Back up a couple more generations, and you get to Sam’s great-great- grandfather, a Confederate sharpshooter from Alabama named Jim Crow. Wounded early in the battle of Gaines’ Mill, made sergeant and then wounded again at Gettysburg.

But more recently, Sam’s dad paid his way through college picking peas for Green Giant, headed north, and ended up as a non-fiction editor at The New Yorker for 30 years. 

How does this happen, and why? What does it mean to confront this kind of a legacy? And what does it say about both cultural and physical emigration throughout American history?

Born from a desire to confront his family’s past, Heritage seeks to interrogate the buried stories that many would rather leave untouched. Through interviews with David Remnick, editor-in-chief of The New Yorker magazine, Edward L. Ayers, a National Humanities Medal-winning author, Japanese-American internment prisoners and relatives, scholars, writers, and many more, Samuel Crow probes the heart of American white supremacy, examining the best and the worst of the North, the South, and the cross-cultural currents that flow between them.