With the endless parade of legal dramas, small claims reality shows, and an entire network devoted solely to the wheels of justice, it’s understandable if you’ve hit the point of fatigue for any sort of filmed courtroom experience. Improbably, director Joe Berlinger actually brings something new to the table in Crude, which looks at a long-running, multi-billion dollar class action suit involving 30,000 residents of the Ecuadorian Amazon on one side, and oil giant Chevron on the other. The residents claim that Chevron (actually, Texaco, whose legal liability Chevron assumed when they purchased the company) left millions of barrels of oil sitting in pits all along the villages lining the Amazon, contaminating the land and the water, and causing outbreaks of cancer, birth defects, and horrific skin conditions. The environmental impact is estimated to be many times that of the Exxon Valdez spill.

Crude is a courtroom drama that never actually sees the inside of a courtroom. After years of stalling and maneuvering, Chevron’s lawyers managed to move the case from the United States to Ecuador, and it’s as the proceedings are finally getting underway there that Berlinger and his crew pick up the action. But hearings aren’t limited to wood-paneled chambers there, and the entirety of the legal arguments shown in the movie take place on site visits to contaminated areas, where the judge takes in the situation, and hears arguments from the lawyers and witnesses right then and there, with news crews and onlookers gathered around.