I first saw The Killing Fields when I was at university.

I’d heard of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, just as I’d heard of Hitler and the Holocaust. Intellectually I knew that individuals, and that groups of humans, could be cruel, even evil. That a charismatic leader could take insecurities and festering resentments and turn them into absolute horror.

But this movie, The Killing Fields, the story of Dith Pran, a journalist who survived the Khmer Rouge regime, somehow made it real. This movie is at its heart the story of a friendship: between Dith Prah, a Cambodian interpreter, and Sydney Schanberg, a New York Times reporter who was in Phnom Penh when the Khmer Rouge claimed victory and took control of Cambodia. Schanberg made it back to the United States; Pran did not.

Over the next four years, Pran survived the brutality and the capriciousness of the Khmer Rouge regime while around him, 1.5 to 2 million people–almost a quarter of the pre-Khmer Rouge population of Cambodia–were tortured, murdered, or died of starvation and buried in mass graves. Somehow he escaped and made his way to a refugee camp in Thailand, where he was reunited with Schanberg. Pran became a photojournalist for the New York Times and never stopped campaigning on behalf of the victims of the Khmer Rouge regime.

I can’t watch The Killing Fields without crying, just as I cannot watch Boys Don’t Cry without crying. It’s such an amazing depiction of the evil within humanity, and because it’s such a personal story, it breaks through the distance with the viewer and makes it real. I’m touched by the courage and the determination of people like Dith Pran and Haing S. Ngor, who were able to survive this experience and share it with us.

I have a habit of reading books and watching movies that overwhem me. Sometimes I’m terrified (in a fit of sheer stupidity I read The Hot Zone, The Coming Plague, and The Perfect Storm in the space of about ten days, and I was somewhat reluctant to leave my house at the end of it all), and sometimes I’m angered or saddened or horrified at what we humans are capable of (this is how I felt after watching The Killing Fields and Boys Don’t Cry).

More than one person has suggested that I should perhaps back away from books and movies that leave me feeling this way, but I believe that art is not necessarily meant simply to entertain. Enjoyment can be the purpose of a work of art, but sometimes I think it’s good to be exposed to something provocative, something that makes me think, makes me want to learn more. Makes me more aware of the world around me.

A couple of weeks ago I watched a movie called Osama. The story is set in Kabul during the reign of the Taliban, and was filmed in Kabul by Iranian filmmakers in the immediate aftermath of the ousting of the Taliban. That the movie was filmed at all in such conditions is astounding; the director and cinematographer created a sense of spare immediacy that pulled me right into the story.

The story is simple: Under the Taliban, women were not allowed to work, or even to leave their homes without a male escort. However, the Soviet invasion and occupation of the 1980s followed by the Soviet withdrawal and civil war of the 1990s and 2000s left a number of female-only households – families whose fathers and grandfathers were “martyrs” in the struggles of those 20+ years. How were these families to survive when the mere act of going outside could result in arrest?

Osama is the story of such a family: a young girl, her mother, and her grandmother are at the mercy of an extended network of family and friends, and when that network cannot provide them with the most basic necessities, the grandmother cuts off her granddaughter’s hair and turns her into a boy, Osama, who can get a job and support the family. Unfortunately, Osama is rounded up, along with the other young boys, and taken to be “educated” by the Taliban. Things soon go from bad to worse.

Although this is a movie with a clear message, that message is not delivered in the angry, over-the-top, “let me orate and show you the error of your ways” manner that characterizes a lot of American films. Instead, the story unfolds without anger, without rancor, but with a bone-deep sorrow. I couldn’t even talk about the movie after I saw it because I would have broken down into tears. For me, that increases the power of Osama: anger is an emotion that for me is easily dissipated because there’s so much of it in the American media. But this movie made me stop and think, and even now I’m still thankful to the filmmakers for telling this story.

I can’t recommend Osama as entertainment because it’s so difficult to watch. But as art, I think it’s amazing.