Veteran producer, director, and agent provocateur Paul Saltzman spent five months in the tiny hamlet of Charleston to make his latest film, Prom Night in Mississippi (which opens here on Friday [November 20]). But it wasn’t the first, or even the second time he had bunked down in that remote part of the American South.

The Ontario native was just 21 when he drove alone to Washington, D.C., in 1965 to meet other members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (including Stokely Carmichael). They were there to attend workshops in civil disobedience and lobby Congress to enforce civil-rights laws. He then headed to Greenwood, Mississippi, where activists were already protesting the suppression of black voters.

“We were placed with local families,” Saltzman recalls on the line from his Toronto office. “I stayed for two months with the Greens, a very courageous black family who gave civil-rights workers a place to sleep. Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier had both stayed there the previous year.”

The future filmmaker subsequently spent 10 days in jail with a thousand other protesters. This was about half an hour from Charleston, which he would visit more than 30 years later while shooting Return to Mississippi, a documentary that’s still in the editing stage.

“The film is a road trip in which I go back and explore how Mississippi has changed and not changed. Morgan Freeman is in it, along with Belafonte, and the Ku Klux Klan. I found Byron De La Beckwith Jr.—the son of the man who murdered civil-rights activist Medgar Evers—and we met on the same spot where he punched me in the head in 1965.”

The day Saltzman finished shooting that retrospective doc, he learned that Charleston High School still had segregated proms. It transpired that Freeman, a local resident who grew up there, had offered to pay for an integrated prom and nobody took him up on it.

“The next morning I phoned him and he said, ‘That was 10 years ago!’ But when I asked if the offer was still good, he answered, ‘Um, okay.’ ”

The filmmaker then documented the 2008 machinations between white and black students—but mostly between their off-screen parents—leading up to the kind of school function most people take for granted. Apparently, things aren’t moving as quickly in the Obama era as one might expect.

“Same goes for Canada,” the director asserts. “We like to think we’re better, but it just works different up here. In any case, the audience response at Canadian festivals has been thrilling. People are thinking about their own attitudes and beliefs. That’s why we made the film.”

Two of the male subjects of Prom Night are serving in Iraq, but a pair of female grads are expected to attend the film’s Toronto premiere.

“Oh, and Morgan is flying in today for a special screening in Oakville,” he mentions, obviously reminding himself of the day’s duties, culminating with a fundraiser for the Moving Beyond Prejudice initiative, founded by Saltzman and his Prom Night coproducer wife, Patricia Aquino. (More on this can be found at www.promnightinmississippi.com)

“It was created to get this film to schools that might not have the means to screen it. Then they can have discussions about the ways prejudice still gets in our way, even in 2009.”