Amy Berg’s documentary Deliver Us From Evil was about as frank and cutting as an indictment of the child abuse that has occurred within Catholic Priesthood could be. The patterns of pedophilia and the cover-ups by Catholic authorities are well-known now, but as with any large-scale tragedy, it’s sometimes tough to fully grasp the damage being done unless you look at individual stories. Her film focused on one particularly disturbing and unrepentant priest, now free after a moderate jail sentence, and the superiors who hid him away in parish after parish. While the film got an Oscar nom for Best Documentary, it was passed over in favor Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

Berg’s turned her attention to doing a narrative feature now, but it is one that is rooted in real life, large scale tragedy just as Evil was. This Is Not America is the story of an American Indian girl in Alaska taken from her parents in the 60s and sent to foster care homes as part of America’s long-running “Americanization” program. The program was an attempt to forcibly assimilate ethnic children into “mainstream” American society. For Native Americans, this usually meant being forced to attend Indian Boarding Schools, which were thinly disguised indoctrination centers posing as educational institutions.

Berg found the woman the movie is based on a few years back when she worked at CNN as an investigative producer. The network had no interest in doing her story, but Berg kept at it and finally managed to purchase the rights to the story on her own.