NEW YORK (Bloomberg) – In the opening scene of "Little Rock Central: 50 Years Later'', Minnijean Brown Trickey surveys the campus of Little Rock Central High School. It's been half a century since the US Army escorted her and eight other black students through a sea of white bodies, and she is struggling to hold back her tears.

"This is not supposed to be like this. It can't be 50 years," she says. "You are supposed to be over it."

"It" is the personal experience of desegregation, the subject of Brent and Craig Renaud's documentary, which debuts tonight at 9 p.m. Bermuda time on HBO. The brothers grew up in Little Rock and now live in New York. They spent a year observing Central High, a school that by most accounts exists today as two institutions, one white, one black.

Trickey, 66, now a civil-rights activist in Little Rock, sees it regularly. In one scene, she's guest-lecturing a history class and stops to express her dismay about the make-up of the class. She invites a student, 15-year-old Jade Robinson, to come up and describe the problem. After guessing incorrectly, Jade finally gets it: Blacks are on one side of the room, whites on the other.

In 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower called in the 101st Airborne Division of the Army to ensure the safe desegregation of Central. Eisenhower took control after Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus deployed the National Guard to keep black students out of the school, flouting a US Supreme Court ruling. Trickey and the other black students who entered Central High on September 25 were later dubbed the Little Rock nine.

Craig Renaud, 33, graduated from Central in 1992, two years after Brent, 35, finished at Little Rock's Hall High School. They've been making documentaries since 2001 on topics ranging from college football to drug addiction; in 2004 and 2005, they produced a ten-part series on mercenary soldiers in Iraq.

"This was certainly one of the more personally close films that we've done," Craig said in an interview after a September 15 screening in San Francisco. "It helps a lot that we're from the community, in the sense of getting the trust and access we needed to tell the story."

Their style involves no narration. Every voice in the movie comes from the witnesses: students, parents, teachers, the school principal and administrators, as well as Little Rock politicians and residents. Scenes are shot in the homes of students in low-income neighbourhoods surrounded by boarded-up buildings. They're also filmed in wealthy areas with big houses and green lawns.

Maya Nation, 16, is a black student with two children. She's shown at home with her kids, boyfriend and some school friends. One minute she's dancing with her friends and the next she's acknowledging how difficult life will be trying to finish school, get a job and feed her kids.

Contrast that with Central's golf team, coached by Shannah Ellender. The squad consists of white boys who are well on their way to college, a scene that helps illustrate why Central was the nation's 26th-ranked high school in 2007, according to Newsweek.

"It is two completely different ends of the spectrum," Ellender says from the golf course.

The lunch room is divided. The advanced-placement classes are predominantly white and the remedial classes almost all black. Whites drive cars to school, while blacks take the bus. It's the haves and the have-nots at every turn in a school that is now about 60 percent black.

"Is it perfect?" Central's principal, Nancy Rousseau, asks in the film. "No, but we have a come a long way."

That's the discomfiting truth. Fifty years after its doors were opened to all, Little Rock Central High is deeply segregated. And it's not alone. Following the screening in San Francisco, students from the area said publicly that this movie depicts their schools, a theme the Renaud brothers said is being discussed at screenings nationwide.

"Central High in a lot of ways is much bigger than Little Rock," Brent said. "Fifty years later, it's a symbol for what's going on in so many districts around the country."