Watched “At the Death House Door” Tuesday at the Nashville Film Festival. It’s a documentary about about executions in the state of Texas … Huntsville in particular.

There a man named Reverend Carroll Pickett ministered to an inmate on Death Row all day before he or she was executed that night. It took its toll on the Pickett, who after overseeing the execution of 95 people, finally gave up the job.

Now he is working to ban executions in Texas. And that’s really the film’s point. Executions don’t do anyone any good. Directors Steve James and Peter Gilbert, the same team that made “Hoop Dreams,” probably the most acclaimed documentary to date, attended the screening of the film and answered questions afterward.

James and Gilbert said they decided to make “At the Death House Door” after being contacted by two reporters from The Chicago Tribune, who thought the botched investigation that led to the execution of an innocent man, Carlos de Luna, would make a good documentary. The filmmakers were intrigued by the case, but they didn’t agree to the project until the reporters told them about a fascinating preacher named Pickett, who became the focus of their film.

Pickett, a solitary, hard-working man, sat down and recorded his thoughts on cassette after each execution. It was a form of therapy for him. Snippets of those recordings are used in the “At the Death House Door.” They are drawn from judiciously, mainly to enrich the story lines of this thorough and fine documentary.

I asked James and Gilbert whether Pickett, being a conservative from Texas, resisted becoming the subject of a documentary. They said he was a willing participant because had been treated fairly by the Chicago Tribune reporters, and because he viewed the whole process as a therapeutic one.

“(But) I think at one point he said we were on a 30-day trial period,” Gilbert recalled.

Quite an organized man, Pickett had done some checking into backgrounds of the filmmakers, too. When the three first met, Pickett had in hand a file full of information about “Hoop Dreams” and some of James and Gilbert’s other work.

For more information about “At the Death House Door” visit their production company’s Web site, Kartemquin Films, at www.kartemquin.com.