Much of movie-going is based on the suspension of disbelief. Audiences are savvy enough to know that superheroes and giant alien robots don’t really exist, so they easily set aside reality when the lights dim and the Dolby-enhanced soundtrack kicks in.

That ingrained behavior can create a subconscious dilemna when watching a documentary film. When a documentary filmmaker asks an audience to believe what it’s seeing, it almost goes against the very nature of cinema. That makes the filmmaker’s job much harder: He or she has to function as a storyteller and an investigative journalist; not just telling a story but proving it with incontrovertable research. The more incredible the story, the larger the burden of proof. But when a documentary filmmaker can meet that standard, the experience is incomparable.

Deep Water is a top-notch retelling of a 1968 competition, sponsored by London’s Sunday Times to sail solo around the world non-stop. At the time, nobody knew if a boat could make it, or if the human mind could stand the months of solitude it would require. An Englishman had just circumnavigated the globe alone – albeit with stops for repairs, and his triumph was the talk of the country. The sailor who could up that ante, and circumnavigate the globe in one shot, would become a national hero.

Eight rugged, hero-adventurer types signed on and one by one headed out to sea. The ninth and last man in the field was Donald Crowhurst, a congenial, nautically undistinguished English everyman. Owner of a failing marine electronics company, he was convinced his technology would give him an unbeatable advantage over the other sailors. He mortgaged almost everything his family of six owned on a gamble that he could finish. Failure would ruin his family.

There were two prizes – one for the first around, and one for the fastest time – but to qualify the sailors had to sail by October 31st. The front-runners had departed months before the deadline. Crowhurst set sail with just hours to spare, and immediately fell behind. It was almost apparent that he had no chance of circumnavigating the globe. In fact, his boat won’t even make a respectable start to the race.

To describe what happens next would spoil the belief-defying spell of Deep Water. Suffice it to say, when trapped between a rock and a hard place, the resourceful Crowhurst opts for neither. The filmmakers, Louise Ormond and Jerry Rothwell, weave plentiful archive footage together with some harrowing ocean cinematography and chilling sound design to soar over that theshold of skepticism into the awe-inspiring realm of amazement.

Their secret weapon is footage shot by the sailors themselves of their actual journey. Many of them had 16mm cameras on-board, given to them by the BBC for press coverage purposes. It’s a rare and revealing look. Crowhurst, born into moderate privilige in India then thrust into poverty back in England, has the jumpiness of a man never quite in his element. Poised and properly chin-up English for the TV cameras, he set sail wearing a sweater and a tie. Deep Water is able to take that footage and look deeper, veering from the comic to the absurd to the tragic. There are many moments the audience gets to look him in the eye, and we can almost see him peeling away, trying to escape, perpetually going from the frying pan to the fire to a bigger fire.

Mainstream documentaries like this have been few and far between lately. Despite some redundancies and a slightly stretched out running time, Deep Water is a rare pleasure in cinema – slick, engrossing, and harrowing experience that is absolutely true.

Pastor Becky Fischer is a woman with a mission. As an evangelical Christian, she wants to see the whole world united before her favorite Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. She’s also a primally smart woman with an agenda. Her mission is to convert the children, with the logic that what you imprint onto a child at the age of 8, 9, or 10 will stay with that child for life.

She might seem more like a brassy Texas housewife than a cult leader, but she holds a magnetic sway over her young charges. Every year she hosts a bible camp at an isolated ranch; ironically located in Devil’s Lake, North Dakota that draws hundreds of children from around the country. At most summer camps, kids tell ghost stories and ride horses. Under Pastor Fischer, these kids spend hours at prayer, speaking in tongues, weeping in prayer, and chanting for the immediate end of abortion.

It would be very easy for Jesus Camp to play as a shrill piece of anti-Christian propaganda. Indeed, the ultra-liberal West Hollywood audience where I saw the film roared with laughter at every reverential mention of George W. Bush. Unlike the audience, however, the filmmakers treat their subjects with evenness and respect. The camera rarely editorializes, and the subjects are given space to speak freely and at length about their beliefs.

While the film itself is unafraid to engage in sly urban-hipster humor at the landscape of churches and fast food restaurants that fill up Missouri, it does have welcome moments of balance. She is allowed to speak freely, and she is at ease on camera. Watching the filmmakers’ footage of her young flock falling over in the aisles and speaking in tongues, she takes an obvious pride in her ministry’s work.

It’s easy for the hyper-literate, post-modern cognoscenti to be horrified at the brainwashing these children seem to be steeped in. An audience full of smug, unmarried thirty-somethings who still live like over-privilged twenty-somethings are forgetting is that we’re watching children. They are malleable. They are eager to please. And they change. The odds that every child who attends Bible Camp will spend the balance of their adult life as a rabid bible-thumper are slim. Television is insidious, and peer pressure is unavoidable. These kids will make their own way as surely as the rest of us godless heathens did. The best of them will reach adulthood with a solid moral compass deeply engrained in their thinking, and the worst of them will become shrill, intolerant talk-radio hosts. But is that intolerance any worse than the venomous blue-state, anti-Republican intransigence that is passed around today.

The audience seems to forget what the rubes are slowly figuring out — being media savvy is a quick route to power. A segment in Jesus Camp takes place in a massive evangelical church in Boulder, Colorado where the church-going population is growing at a near exponential rate. (And, interestingly, the founding pastor recently resigned due to his role in a gay sex/crystal meth scandal). The service is held in the round like a rock concert, with an elaborate A/V setup that would dwarf many public access stations. The volatile elements of the Christian right are figuring out quickly what draws an audience and what keeps them coming back.

We also seem to have forgotten that our enemy is watching us, and sooner or later will posess the same tactics that we use. That is one of Becky Fischer’s philosophies. At points, she waxes almost rhapsodic about how Palestinian children and brainwashed from birth and handed weapons at shockingly young ages. Given a slight change in circumstances, it’s very easy to see her passing out handguns and semi-automatic weapons for her young charges to use in their war for Christ.

It’s tempting to extract a larger narrative out of Jesus Camp. Given the current political climate and the deep air of mistrust that hangs low over the religious right, using the people portrayed in Jesus Camp to bash the whole of religion seems like everyone’s patriotic duty.

Crafting a portrait of people on the fringe is risky business. It’s all too easy to end up preaching to the choir, or holding the subjects up to unwitting mockery (as in the odious American Movie). Errol Morris sidesteps this issue by warmly siding with his subjects, and gamely following them down whatever path their eccentricities take them. The makers of Jesus Camp wisely stay out of the way, and give their subjects all the space they want. As admirable as that approach is, it leaves the editorializing to the audience. It’s easy to imagine that Pastor Fischer and her children are delighted with the platform they’ve received. In the theaters in Los Angeles, though, her position of aggressive religious belief is like throwing raw meat to the dogs.

Sure, it’s very easy to laugh at the family who reveres the leadership of George W. Bush because of his open and fervent religious convictions. But for those who do laugh, what’s difficult is to accept that family as every bit the equal American citizen as the gay-marriage supporting, Republican bashing Hollywood liberal. There is no longer a political vocabulary for compromise in the current climate. It’s all or nothing, and holding onto that stark dichotomy is dangerous.