A documentary by Patrick Reed. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, November 21, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

Even when Dr. James Orbinski talks about the “uncontrollable rage” he feels after witnessing atrocities in Rwanda and Somalia, he does so with grim stoicism. He seems to have pushed all his horror deep inside a rock-hard shell, and he would have to: a weaker person would have gone insane in the face of such carnage.

The central focus of the documentary Triage: Dr. James Orbinski’s Humanitarian Dilemma is not your typical movie subject. As he travels from Toronto back to the African countries where, 15 years ago, he worked with Médecins Sans Frontií¨res (Doctors Without Borders), the organization’s former president can seem remote. At first, this makes it difficult for Triage to connect.

Fortunately, filmmaker Patrick Reed fills in the emotional void with lush photography. We scan the rolling, green fields outside a Kigali hospital where Orbinski recalls that dogs used to feed on machete victims, or an endless landscape of round rag tents where former famine victims still struggle to rebuild their lives. Newsreel footage and political commentary help round out a film as complex as the factors that led to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda or the crippling 1993 famine in Somalia—and certainly one that can’t be summed up by its unwieldy title. There are many dilemmas touched on here: the uneasy relationship between humanitarian workers and the security forces they need to protect them; the hard choices of doctors trying to select who to save and who to let die.

But the central dilemma lies inside our enigmatic subject himself. What drives a man to endure danger to save the lives of a species bent on slaughtering each other? How can he return to a happy family life after seeing women raped and tortured, children stacked in death shrouds? The answers come when his shell finally cracks and the memories surface, like the small girl he can still see refusing to leave the side of her near-dead mother amid a pile of corpses. The final message is an affecting one: if Orbinski, after all he has seen, still has hope for humanity, then all of us should.