Two lenses capture a divided town

The concept was surprisingly simple: A white and a black filmmaker go to a divided town and interview members of their own racial communities after a modern-day lynching.

The resulting documentary - "Two Towns of Jasper," airing on PBS's P.O.V. series on Jan. 22 - is compelling, not because its underlying subject is new, sadly, but because its viewpoint is.

The film grew out of a realization by the two filmmakers that just as their reactions had been different to the murder - one was surprised by it, the other was not - that the crime offered an opportunity to highlight how differently black and white Americans experience the world.

By offering insight into how each group talked among themselves about the same event, the duo hoped to help improve communication about race.

"Marco and I have been friends for a long time, and have sort of felt there was no language to discuss race anymore in any sort of constructive way," says Whitney Dow, the white documentarian, in a phone interview. "We thought perhaps if we created something where people didn't talk across race, but had the opportunity to sort of look in and listen to what the other group felt, that it might be a more effective way of communicating."

Fueling the experiment was the 1998 murder of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Texas (pop. 7,000). Mr. Byrd was chained to a pickup truck and dragged to his death by three white men, at least two of whom had ties to white supremacist movements.

"I was instantly drawn to the crime," says Mr. Dow. "It reminded me of something about America that you kind of hope was more in the past. It was a murder that had all these hallmarks of a traditional, if you can use that word, lynching."

When Dow heard about it, he went to Jasper to see the racial battle that was playing out there. He also called his longtime friend Marco Williams, an experienced filmmaker, who didn't share his friend's amazement.

"I said, 'You know, Whitney, it's a terrible thing, I haven't really been following it. But I'm neither shocked nor surprised, because it's not the first time in America that a black man has been brutally murdered by whites," he says.

The two men spent 100 days in Jasper, each working with "segregated" crew members and exclusively interviewing residents of his own race. In order that the town not find out they were working together, Dow and Williams avoided contact. They stayed at separate hotels and would occasionally hold cellphone conversations standing next to each other on the courthouse lawn.

Williams says that task was easy for him - the town was so racially divided that he almost never encountered white people.

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