East of the Mississippi River, under halos of oak trees, the eternal residents of Watkins Street Cemetery slumber while their aging guardians are hard at work. For over two decades, and with limited resources, the Worthy Women of Watkins Street have nurtured one of Black Natchez’s most vital community archives. The Gardeners is a spiritual record of the earthly days of the Worthy Women and an invocational contribution to architectural study and preservation. Living between this life and the next, this documentary feature is guided by the labor of caretakers and memory keepers framing the cemetery as a third space and museum of communal memory Natchez, Mississippi.

Crystal Kayiza is a Ugandan-American filmmaker raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A member of the New Negress Film Society, she is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, Creative Capital Award, Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship and Sundance Ignite Fellowship. Her most recent film, Rest Stop, premiered at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival and won the 2023 Jury Prize for Best US Short at the Sundance Film Festival. Named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film,” Kayiza’s work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, BlackStar Film Festival, SXSW, and distributed by The New Yorker, PBS, Le Cinéma Club, and NOWNESS.