Brief Synopsis

George, a Black college student in Ohio, joins a class visit to a historic ravine once used as an Underground Railroad passage. What begins as a routine academic excursion gradually unsettles him as reenactments, local folklore, and campus routine blur into something more disquieting. Beneath the surface of abolitionist pride and preserved architecture, George senses a deeper history of control, performance, and selective memory.

As the day unfolds, surreal disruptions fracture the boundary between past and present, power structures that once governed the ravine seem to echo in contemporary social hierarchies, and a seemingly moral triumph begins to feel like a carefully curated myth that obscures the compromises and complicities that followed. George is forced to confront his own place within this narrative his community continues to uphold. In reckoning with the mythology of the past, he must decide whether to accept the story he has inherited or challenge the structures that still shape it.

Part historical excavation, part psychological descent, Local Color explores past injustices’ reverberations into the present including who benefits from the memory, and who is erased by it.