If you lived through the 1960s, you no doubt remember when three young civil rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner—were murdered by Klansmen and later found buried in an old earthen dam. You may also recall that no one was prosecuted for that murder until 40 years later, in 2005, when the state of Mississippi indicted Edgar Ray Killen, an 80-year old Baptist preacher and unrepentant racist.

Dickoff at the courthouse

Neshoba: The Price of Freedom is a unique film in that filmmakers Micki Dickoff and Tony Pagano were able to get close to Killen, the first time he allowed access. According to Dickoff, they managed this feat both by the fact that they truly did want his story, his point of view, and that they reminded him that they weren’t “the media,” but rather documentary filmmakers.

The result is a stunning up-close-and-personal look at Killen, as well as many other seminal figures of that 1964 event. It’s something that anyone interested in American history should see—and will be able to see when First Run Features opens it at New York’s Cinema Village on August 13 and at Los Angeles’ Laemmle Music Hall on September 10.

According to Dickoff, the film took six-and-a-half years to make, during which time she and Pagano took no salaries (they did receive grants from the Andrew Goodman Foundation). Except for a soundman, the two did everything themselves: Dickoff, the writer, and Pagano the cinematographer, with both of them serving as producers, directors and editors.  The film’s budget hit an obstacle after the rough cut. “We couldn’t afford to do the fine cut and pay for all the archival and music rights,” said Dickoff. So the duo took the film on the festival circuit (paying only for festival rights), won awards and got into incredible discussions with people about race. And got the $150,000 it would take to buy the release rights for archival footage and music.

Pagano behind the camera.

Dickoff says she wanted to make this film since she was 17, the age she was in 1964 when the three youths were murdered. She had actually planned to go to Mississippi to volunteer during this Freedom Summer, but her father, who had grown up in a small Mississippi town, forbade it.  Dickoff won an Emmy for the 1987 documentary Too Little Too Late, which addressed the AIDS epidemic from the point of view of mothers losing children.

But the story of the civil rights workers stuck with her. On the 35th anniversary of the event, she made a false start when when Ben Chaney called her to discuss making a movie about justice in the case. With some seed money from HBO, she showed up in Mississippi with cameras … but Chaney thought better of speaking. Even in 1999, the level of fear surrounding the event was too potent to ignore. It was a set-back for Dickoff, who put the project on the backburner. At the same time, however, she was becoming closer friends with Carolyn Goodman, Andrew’s mother.

“As the 40th anniversary started to approach, I read about the Philadelphia Coalition, a group in the community that decided to talk about the murders,” said Dickoff. “I thought – the film has to be made, to find some sense of justice for the mothers.” With her colleague and cinematographer Pagano, Dickoff thought they would follow this group as it struggled to do the right thing. “I had no idea it would take 20 trips to Mississippi and 5 years,” said Dickoff.

Getting the trust of Edgar Ray Killen changed all that. “It was very important to us that we not lie to him,” said Dickoff. “It was important to get at his truth. It was important not to make him the ultimate villain of the movie, because that wouldn’t address the issues of what made him and the complicity of the silence all these years. ”

After ten months of refusing an interview, Killen was indicted in January 2005. Through mutual acquaintances, Killen agreed to an interview in his lawyer’s office, but he spent the two hours proclaiming his innocence. “I said, you have so much truth to tell: your story has never been told,” said Dickoff. “So he told us to come over to his house, and that began what turned into five months.” At one point, Killen has an accident that made him more vulnerable. “After the accident, we had more access to him because he couldn’t walk,” said Dickoff. “We tried to humanize him, to truly tell his story. It would have been too simplistic to just say, we got the bad guy, it’s over.  He only organized it and made it happen: he wasn’t on the scene. I wanted him to feel comfortable to tell his story. I wasn’t going to put words in his mouth.”

Pagano reports how the documentary was shot. “We travelled with two cameras – an Ikegami HLV-55 and an HLV-59, a later-version, newer camera that shot 16×9. But the HLV-55 was NTSC and 4×3, so we stayed 4×3.  I set it up with a two-person crew: me and my sound man. [Richard Juliano, Richard Tropiano and Tom Landi are credited with location sound.] We took one camera off-axis slightly over Micki’s shoulder, who was doing the interviews. The second camera we shot profile. This way we could intercut the cameras in real time, or if we wanted to do a pull-up. We didn’t shoot hands or anything like that. I wanted to use the second camera to give us an edit point as well.”

Edgar Ray Killen

Thinking about how he would stylistically shoot the interviews, Pagano suggested that they shoot them in limbo, so viewers wouldn’t be distracted by the backgrounds, and he wouldn’t have to carry around a large lighting kit. The interviews would also all look consistent. To get that look, he wrapped the room in Duvetyne. Lighting was very simple and classic. “Every single main interview is only done with two lights,” said Pagano. “I took a soft-source chimera off of one side and used a small reflector, but with the white side and put that on the dark side of the face to pick it up a little.  And a 200-watt backlight on a dimmer was 180 degrees from where the key source was lighting the face.” The sound man ran lavalier mics into a mixer and set the same audio in time code to the two cameras to sync them up. “When we went into edit, we transferred both cameras, even with some big events where people were giving speeches,” said Pagano. “We just kept it on a wide shot on the podium and roamed with the other camera handheld.”

One of the most challenging of shooting was the oppressive heat. “We were doing 16-, 18-hour days with the rig on my shoulder,” he said. “The physical aspect was grueling.” But even more difficult was spending endless hours in close proximity to Killen and his many Klan friends while they also maintained a close relationship with the families of the murdered civil rights workers. Their “cover” was almost blown when they went to dinner with Carolyn Goodman and a group of Klansmen walked in to the same restaurant. “I went over to the table and started rapping with them, while Micki took Carolyn upstairs,” said Pagano.  “I’ve interviewed everyone from five Presidents to drug addicts. I’ve worked for all the networks. And I felt my career had come to this pinnacle where I knew how to blend, how to get along with a racist.”

Dickoff and Pagano had a few other scary moments: Killen’s brother threatened them both at one point. When they shot a subjective POV of the murder scene, a pick-up truck of men with guns menaced them. Dickoff says her worst moment was the day Carolyn Goodman—then 88—testified. “I was still trying to humanize this man,” said Dickoff. “So I said, Edgar, can’t you feel badly about a mother losing a child? Thinking anyone would feel bad. And he said, maybe if she’d been a Christian woman. I had to take a deep breath. That was hard for me.”

Editing 300 hours of tape was also no walk in the park, especially since Pagano lives in New York and Dickoff in Los Angeles. Both of them working on Final Cut Pro systems, they divvied up scenes, and send them to each other using iDisk. “The editing was a good collaboration and took over 2 years,” said Dickoff. “I like to tell personal stories that address a bigger issue. I like to tell stories without narration, which makes transitions harder. I want to be a fly on the wall—I don’t want to be part of the story.”

Neshoba: The Price of Freedom is a riveting one.