In 1997, actor Morgan Freeman, a resident of Charleston, Miss., wanted to do something about the bizarre practice at the community's high school of holding racially segregated proms. The school, of course, had been desegregated for decades, but a group of white parents, whose rationale remains unspoken, had managed to preserve this appalling tradition. Freeman offered to cover all the costs of the school's prom on the condition that it not exclude anyone on account of race. Though this was ignored, the actor made the same offer in 2008 and this time he did foot the bill for an integrated prom, the subject of which became the core of Canadian filmmaker Paul Saltzman's documentary, Prom Night in Mississippi, which runs this summer as part of HBO Documentary Films.

Saltzman, who had spent time in the South in the mid-'60s working toward voting reforms, knew the area was a very different place than he'd seen four decades earlier, but found this little vestige of the old ways and Freeman's reaction and involvement fertile subjects for a documentary. "I met Morgan through a friend and spent time with him on that trip," says Saltzman. "I thought there's a film to make here. There's a dialogue to encourage here. I believe there's not a human being on the planet with absolutely no prejudice and I wanted to make a film that could help young people consider their own attitudes even for a moment. When you hear people talk, you realize healing is possible."

Saltzman stayed in town for more than four months, gathering interviews and becoming something of an institution at the school and on the streets. "I brought my Canon XH A1 and shot in the 16:9, 24F format," he says. "I really like the camera. You can hold it in one hand and it has a very low profile."

Cinematographer Don Warren also joined the shoot. Some of the interviews with the local kids and with Freeman were shot by a fellow Canadian—a videographer known simply as Bongo—using a Panasonic VariCam recording 720p HD on DVCPRO tape. "I'm not qualified to shoot with a VariCam," Saltzman explains, "and I was directing and producing and doing the interviews, so I didn't want to be responsible for the camera work there, too."

Saltzman also distributed two Canon HV-20s to groups of students, who would be able to capture aspects of daily life for Charleston high schoolers that his crew likely couldn't. "We divided the 12 kids into four teams and taught them something about shooting, editing, production managing and recording," Saltzman recalls. "We wanted anything from their lives. But they didn't do as much shooting as we'd hoped. Most of what we got was 'diary' stuff"—one person talking into the camera. There's not much of them going out and playing around."

Lighting was kept to a minimum during production. "For the interviews with Morgan, we used no lights and no reflectors," Saltzman notes. "We shot a school board meeting with no lights either. For the prom committee meeting, we thought about masking the windows because there was a lot of daylight out there, but we decided not to." His goal was to capture the events, not necessarily to create the prettiest pictures. Of the contrasty situation, the filmmaker says, "We decided we could live with what the camera do, and anything extra we could do in post. We bought a three-light ARRI kit from B&H Photo before the shoot for about $1,000 and that gave us any little amount of fill light we might decide we needed."

Shooting the prom itself was a different story, of course, as it was the focal point of the whole documentary. "We quickly realized that if we didn't do something about lighting the prom, it wouldn't look at all on tape like it did for real," he says, "so we hired the lighting company TLS Services from Jackson. They built six little towers and hung lights off them to cross-light the room. It wasn't much light, but it helped us tremendously. The DJ also brought theatrical lights, and really it was hard to notice that the room was lit. Thank God for high definition, though. If we'd tried to shoot on film, we'd have been dead."