This year’s Sundance featured firsthand accounts of human rights violations in Darfur (Reporter), Tibet (Tibet in Song) and Burma (Burma VJ), so what does it say about me that the documentary that reduced me to a burbling mess was The Cove, a white-knuckle critique of dolphin killing in Japan? The truth is, it may actually reveal less about me than it does the tactics by which the films position their respective causes for audiences — one of the many subjects director Eric Daniel Metzgar contemplates with Reporter.

In his philosophically introspective doc, Metzgar accompanies New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof on his ventures through Africa, deconstructing the methods he uses to convey the atrocities he witnesses there back to his readers in the West (a heavy burden, considering that his writing has the power — or the potential, at least — to influence world leaders). It was Kristof, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, who helped alert the world to the fact that there was a genocide occurring in Darfur.

Metzgar approaches Kristof’s reporting with a healthy skepticism, just as all moviegoers would be advised to handle agenda-driven docs (he explains why victims can be unreliable, causes can obscure logical reasoning and so on). Incorporating himself in the process from the very beginning, Metzgar quotes Kristof’s mission as “to make you care about what’s just over the hill,” raising red flags as the journalist seeks out worst-case atrocities to write about everywhere he goes. In a Congolese camp, Kristof passes over horror stories deemed not depressing enough before training his attention on a withered 41-year-old woman, Yohanita, who was raped by soldiers, saw her fields pillaged and now teeters on the brink of death.

Experience (and a professional interest in research on the psychology of compassion) has taught Kristof that these individual-focused stories are the ones that connect with readers. Citing studies by professor Paul Slovic, Reporter addresses the concept of “psychic numbing,” a notion used to explain the way humans are hard-wired to emotionally reject situations in which large groups of people are threatened by violence, disease or starvation. According to one of Slovic’s experiments, “feelings begin to wane when the number of sufferers reaches just two” (Kristof elaborates on the idea in his column “Save the Darfur Puppy,” only half-sarcastically suggesting that news organizations might be more inclined to engage the subject if presented with images of “a soulful dog in peril,” rather than suffering human beings).

Extrapolating these theories back out to the other films, we find incredibly different tactics in practice. In Tibet in Song, for instance, musicologist Ngawang Choephel (himself a Tibetan refugee) attempts to document his cultural heritage during a risky return trip to his native country. Choephel is not a natural filmmaker, though he’s a uniquely qualified person to make such a documentary, since he was arrested and sentenced to 18 years in prison for performing these lost songs in public. In much the same way Kristof exploits his subjects, journalists the world over fixated on Choephel’s situation and used his case to appeal for intervention — he became the individual through which outsiders could be made to understand the crisis posed by Chinese occupation of Tibet. And yet, in his own film, Choephel downplays his personal story, focusing instead on the traditional Tibetan culture (in this case, music) at risk of being extinguished by these external controlling forces. Yes, protesters are being executed and jailed, but an entire way of life is also at risk, and Choephel wagers that this angle will inspire action.

Director Anders Østergaard’s Burma VJ sets scenes of uprising eerily similar to B-roll featured in Tibet in Song within the context of the thriller-like story of the Democratic Voice of Burma, a concerned-citizens group committed to (illegally) exposing the country’s police-state conditions. To support his high-concept hook, Østergaard intercuts first-hand footage shot amid marches (which devolve into Kent State-style melees, with armed soldiers beating and executing protesters in plain view) with reenacted scenes of “Joshua,” a DVB leader who helped relay this evidence to supporters on the outside. Here is a case in which a filmmaker spotlights an individual for inspirational rather than sympathetic aims, but Burma VJ’s genre-driven narrative approach confuses where concerned audiences should direct their attention: Do we cheer for these heroic resistance fighters or attempt to support the Buddhist monks and ordinary citizens impacted most by these inexcusable conditions?

And then there’s Flipper. The main character of The Cove is charismatic activist Richard O’Barry, who trained the famous TV dolphin and has since dedicated his life to liberating all dolphins held in captivity. Conceptually not so different from Burma VJ, The Cove details a James Bond-like operation by which O’Barry and a number of accomplices (professional divers, ILM special effects crews and other supportive adventure seekers) plan to infiltrate an off-limits cove in Taiji, Japan, where fishermen kill thousands of dolphins each year. O’Barry is sure that if he can only get footage of the atrocity, then dolphin lovers of the world will be inspired to stop the practice. So why is The Cove so much more effective than these other films? Is dolphin slaughter (for those few Japanese who value the meat, despite its toxically high mercury levels) so different from the killing of fish or cattle for human consumption?

O’Barry tells the story of how Kathy, one of the dolphins who played Flipper on TV, died in his arms (dolphins, unlike humans, are not automatic air breathers, and O’Barry believes Kathy was so depressed she ended her life simply by choosing not to take her next breath). He feels personally responsible for the world’s fascination with dolphins — if it weren’t for the show, Sea World-style parks and swim-with-dolphins programs that keep the animals in captivity would not enjoy their current level of popularity. After dolphins are driven toward the Taiji beaches and trapped, trainers come and pick out the lucky few who will be spared (though kept in captivity — a stress-filled but considerably less grisly fate). The rest are redirected to the cove, where they are speared to death out of sight.

Surely there are psychological reasons that The Cove’s climax is so devastating, but it would be unfair to say this is simply another case of “Darfur puppy” persuasion. It could be that as educated, concerned Westerners, we’re already familiar with (and possibly psychically numb to) the atrocities in Darfur, Tibet and Burma, whereas this exposé of dolphin farming packs the element of surprise. But it’s also great filmmaking. Director Louie Psyihoyos (who, like Metzgar and Choephel, includes himself in the documentary) establishes a strong rhetorical argument on behalf of dolphin protection. “The dolphin’s smile is nature’s greatest deception. It creates the illusion that they’re always happy,” O’Barry pronounces in his characteristically overstated style, and yet the movie convincingly argues that dolphins may actually be world’s most intelligent animals. (Old Partner, another Sundance doc, shows how an old Korean owes his livelihood to his 40-year-old ox, but that’s not nearly as dramatic as the story told by one surfer who was saved from a shark attack by a dolphin intervention.)

So, when The Cove eventually unveils the footage of the sea run red with blood (a literal crimson tide, seeping out into view of a public stretch of road) and the actual killing of these creatures, we can’t help but be affected. Reporter’s Metzgar seems to buy Slovic and Kristof’s view that humans have been evolutionarily coded to withstand scenes of mass atrocity, but how do you explain the way other films, such as 2005 Sundance audience award winner Shake Hands With the Devil, devastated us with scenes of Tutsis being butchered in the streets by Rwandan Hutus? But Kristof wants more than to depress us. His aim is for us to engage and actually become involved. Will individual-focused horror stories do that more persuasively than accounts of widespread violence? Will cute animals in peril prove more compelling than human examples? The answers are largely philosophical, but Reporter differs from other heal-the-world docs in that it actually thinks to ask the questions.