Zoë Colfax first learned about Blackdom from an information box in a high school textbook.

Years later, the New Mexico School for the Arts alum is bringing the story of New Mexico's most prominent all-Black settlement to the big screen.

Colfax's documentary, Back to Blackdom, traces the freedom colony's chronicle from its establishment in 1903 to its abandonment in the 1920s to the present day, when descendants of residents are still fighting to access the land once owned by their ancestors 17 miles south of Roswell.

The goal is to bring Blackdom's forgotten history — and the people at the heart of it — to the forefront, Colfax said.

"In all of those stories from civil rights to the Civil War to slavery, Black people are sort of seen as subservient or as passive players in the history," she said. "But in Blackdom's history, Black people are really the protagonists. They're going out to this place in search of self-determination, self-sufficiency."

The film will be available on the PBS Documentaries YouTube channel.

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Colfax, 22, had her first brush with film during her time at the New Mexico School for the Arts, where she studied theater. During the coronavirus pandemic, remote learning meant studying theater became more like studying film, Colfax said.

She later majored in African American studies and film media studies at Yale University, graduating in 2025. Back to Blackdom is the first film she has made outside of school, and is part of a documentary short film series about the Mountain West region of the U.S. called HOMEGROWN: Horizons by executive producer Chloë Walters-Wallace.

Read more at the Santa Fe New Mexican.