“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, Pat Crow reconnected with his brother Jay, breaking a decades-long estrangement. This led to a new relationship with his nephew, writer-director Samuel Crow, and revealed a branch of relatives – and their problematic histories – Sam never knew about.

Sam’s great-great-grandfather was a Confederate sharpshooter from Alabama named Jim Crow. Wounded early in the battle of Gaines’ Mill, made sergeant and then wounded again at Gettysburg. Oversaw enslaved people.

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.

Sam’s dad, Pat Crow, graduated Little Rock Central High – in the second-to-last segregated class, before Brown vs. Board Of Education took effect in Arkansas.

And then things changed. Pat Crow paid his way through journalism school picking peas for Green Giant, headed north, and ended up as a non-fiction editor at The New Yorker magazine, famously urban and liberal, for 30 years.

How do these changes happen, and why? What does it mean for Sam to confront this kind of family legacy? And how do these social and political concerns persist in the current era?

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, National Humanities Medalist Edward L. Ayers,, Japanese-American internees and relatives, scholars, writers, and many more, Samuel Crow probes the heart of American white supremacy from a highly personal point of view.