Colfax is a Reconstruction-era epic about the architecture of American racial violence and the men it conscripts. In the 1840s, plantation owner Orville Buckhead purchases a fair-skinned young girl named Flossie and her uncle at a public market. Two decades later, her white-passing son, Francis Buckhead, opens a brothel in Alexandria, which puts him in the rooms of elites quietly funding Reconstruction's undoing. Through that role, he enables men who seek to avenge a birthright he blames on the wrong villain. That path leads him into a paramilitary group and, on Easter Sunday 1873, to the Colfax Massacre — hunting the very people he was born from, and doesn't know it.