If 2 1/2 hours sounds like an awfully long time to watch a documentary on the national abortion debate, it’s nothing compared with the time it took Tony Kaye to make it. The American History X director spent his own money to follow pro-choice and pro-life activists for 16 years; he stuck around so long that one of his subjects eventually murdered another. It’s strange to describe an abortion documentary as a labor of love, but Lake of Fire —an elegant film, exhaustive in scope—is precisely that.

It’s also remarkable for Kaye’s fearless decision to film two abortion procedures, including a doctor’s sorting through an eviscerated fetus. (His other choice, to film the movie in black-and-white, is as much a mercy to the audience as it is an aesthetic decision.) The refusal to look away from the most appalling realities of the procedure at once strengthens anti-abortion arguments and undermines them; no fundamentalist nutjob will be able to claim Lake of Fire quails from addressing the clinical facts of abortion.

And there are plenty of those nutjobs on display here—perhaps too many. Lake of Fire (which takes its title from the peculiar way extremist anti-abortion protesters tell their opponents to go to hell) continues Kaye’s American History X obsession with national fringe elements: Country-fried theocrats wielding Scripture citations and guns with a frightening gleam in their eyes. These folks were especially paranoid and manic during the Clinton administration—something about Bill and Hillary whipped them into a frenzy—and one of the movie’s weaknesses is how the vast majority of it feels like a time capsule from the mid-’90s. The preoccupation is also a way to pretend to give both sides of the debate equal time, while portraying one party as zealots or fools.

Because make no mistake: Lake of Fire is a fiercely pro-choice movie. It is interested in elevating the national debate (though that commitment would seem more genuine if Kaye bothered to interview a few medical professionals), but it mostly wants to put to lie to the notion that abortions are a matter of convenience. The first abortion Kaye films includes grotesque imagery, but the second is even more wrenching, because it follows the face of the woman having the procedure—a 28-year-old woman named Stacy, who has been abused, is living alone for the first time, and has given up her last child for adoption. When the abortion is finished, Stacy says she’s tired, and breaks down in sobs. Kaye’s message rings clear: Try telling Stacy she doesn’t know the significance of her choice.