“Two Trains Runnin,’” a documentary film by director Sam Pollard, is about the search for two forgotten blues singers, set in Mississippi during the height of the civil rights movement.

In June of 1964 hundreds of college students, eager to join the civil rights movement, traveled to Mississippi, starting what would be known as Freedom Summer.

That same month, two groups of young men — made up of musicians, college students and record collectors — also traveled to Mississippi. Though neither group was aware of the other, each had come on the same errand: to find an old blues singer and coax him out of retirement. Thirty years before, Son House and Skip James had recorded some of the most memorable music of their era, but now they seemed lost to time.  

Finding them would not be easy. There were few clues to their whereabouts. It was not even known for certain if they were still alive.  And Mississippi, that summer, was a tense and violent place. With hundreds on their way to teach in freedom schools and work on voter registration, the Ku Klux Klan and police force of many towns vowed that Freedom Summer would not succeed. Churches were bombed, shotguns blasted into cars and homes.

It was easy to mistake the young men looking for Son House and Skip James as activists. Finally, on June 21, 1964, these two campaigns collided in memorable and tragic fashion.   

“Two Trains Runnin’” not only pays tribute to a pioneering generation of musicians, it cuts to the heart of our present moment, offering a crucial vantage from which to view the evolving dynamics of race in America.

In telling this remarkable story for the first time, “Two Trains Runnin’” revisits an important moment when America's cultural and political institutions were dramatically transformed. The movie is all the more relevant today, in an era of renewed attention on police brutality and voting rights.

If the production team envisioned making an historical documentary, current events soon changed everyone’s minds. Principal photography began in July of 2013, the same month George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin, and not long after the Supreme Court gutted the pre-clearance provision of the Voting Rights Act. Post production began in Nov. of 2014, as the Ferguson riots got underway.  The value of black life, the disparity between America’s promise—its rhetoric—and its reality: these topics again dominate the national conversation, as they did fifty years ago.

In the film Robert Moses, the leader of Freedom Summer, asks, “How do we get the country to take a good look at itself?” Today we are all pondering that same question.

The film will have two screenings only at Lincoln Theater on Thursday, Sept. 28 at 2 and 7 p.m.  Tickets are $8 for adults, $6 for members and youth (18 and under). Tickets will be available  one hour before show time.  This film is not rated.  Additional information can be found by visiting the theater’s website, lcct.org.