It can be hard in England to get a feel for the scale, the power and – yes really – the beauty of the Premier League’s vast global reach. Probably this has something to do with the way it is reflected back, most often through the wild frontier, the cranks’ rodeo, the Hobby Horse Derby of social media.

More toxic still is the way the Premier League’s commercial success is so often described as simply this and nothing more, couched in tones of crowing economic triumphalism that reduces its devotees to numbers, eyeballs, units of desire.

The power of football, the magic of football. Terms such as these have become corrupted by corporate inanity. We think of advert-people: clear-eyed, face-painted, transported by tyre-excitement or Visa-magic, a place where love means consumption, where unity is a roster of approved exclusive rights holders. Welcome to a world where all the people like all the football – and all the football is good. Little wonder it is hard to get a grip on this, to feel its human edges. But those edges are still there. Occasionally they appear in chastening, startling detail. This week I watched Redemption, the first episode of This Is Football, an Amazon Prime series that explores the magical power, the alchemy – and so on – of football and its supporters.

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So far, so familiar. The opening credits have Pep Guardiola sitting around looking damp-eyed and messianic and saying things like: “You must ... love the ball.” A sonorous voice says: “Football isn’t a game. It’s emotion!”, the kind of statement that makes you want to take the person who said it by the ear and tweak their nose and say really, really, is that actually true buckaroo?

And then suddenly everything changes and Redemption takes us somewhere else entirely. The film follows the passionate familial love for Liverpool FC among a group of Rwandans, and the wider role football played in Rwanda’s recovery from the wounds of its terrifyingly recent genocide. It is an extraordinary, redemptive piece of film-making by James Erskine, who also directed One Night In Turin, and with whom I worked briefly on the film From The Ashes. There’s a beautiful opening shot, the camera panning over the dusty roads and jerry-built houses of Kigali, the Rwandan capital, set to the irresistibly cheese-laden, oddly intimate tones of You’ll Never Walk Alone.

A group of men in red shirts are singing “We are Liverpool” gently as they walk through the suburbs. This is the Rwanda Reds, a club for men and women who love Liverpool with a fervour that is initially quite startling. As darkness falls they start to hug and dance in front of the big screen, some crying and laughing at the same time. One man mentions he named his son after a noted local hero. His son is called “Ian Rush”.

There are two main characters. There’s Joe, a ranger in the national park. We see him punching the air in the middle of the plains as Mo Salah scores a goal over the crackly radio in his Toyota pick-up. Joe sighs and says: “When Liverpool score … I feel my daddy. He is always watching, supporting Liverpool.” Then there’s Claude-Romeo, a little younger and about to get married, who says: “Some of us have lost our brothers and sisters. So the Liverpool shirt to me is a family.” These might sound like cliches anywhere else, the kind of thing Nero-era Sepp Blatter used to gabble about. But this isn’t anywhere else.

A bit later we discover that Joe’s daddy, who he thinks about when Liverpool score and who loved Kenny Dalglish, was brutally murdered near the family home. Claude-Romeo doesn’t have any bothers and sisters because, like so many other Rwandans, they were murdered during those hundred days in 1994 when a million Tutsis were slaughtered by their neighbours and countrymen.

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The Belgians brought football to Rwanda in the 19th century. They also brought ethnic division, a fault-line of engineered social tension that would eventually come to a horrendous end. Football has been at the heart of Rwanda’s efforts to recover from this trauma. Again, this is not a platitude. In the aftermath the game sprung up on every patch of land. Orphans, displaced people and half empty villages began to play together. Football became therapy, but also social glue. During the genocide Rwandan women suffered terrible abuse. A national programme of women’s football was introduced as a way of trying to encourage young women to “be active, not taken over by the past”.

Eventually thousands of suspected mass murderers were released from the overcrowded prisons. They began to play football matches against the survivors. A kind of fraternity emerged. Forgiveness became possible. The famous African Cup Of Nations victory against Ghana in 2003 led to scenes of wild shared joy: “We believed then that anything was possible.”

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The film’s absolute kick in the guts comes right at the end when suddenly Joe and Claude-Romeo are in Liverpool going to Anfield, talking about whether Roberto Firmino is going to start. Outside the ground they keep on grinning and hugging and laughing. There’s Joe gazing up at the Kenny Dalglish stand. You know who he’s thinking about. Finally they see the pitch and Joe has to stop and hold his head and take a breath, and by this stage, no I’m not crying, you are, I’m just looking out of the window and being quiet for a bit.

It really is worth a watch. And please don’t tell me about Starbucks’s sponsorship, or indeed about the concerns over Rwanda’s current regime, which have their place too. It’s just that Redemption isn’t about these things. It’s about the actual power, the actual magic of this global sport; something that has been owned and styled by the corporate arm but which has within it an unmapped, unmonetised sense of hope.