This gruelling but vital film should be required viewing, perhaps in school-detention conditions, for Putin, Trump, Farage, opportunist Brexiters, amoral consultants, veteran lobbyists and anyone else from the current mob of democracy-bashers. Four hours discussing a 1989 Uruguayan referendum is probably not somewhere you ever thought you needed to be. But this surprisingly gripping patchwork of regular Joes expressing their intentions and apprehensions to director Kristina Konrad, then working for Swiss television, couldn’t have greater relevance.

The immediate issue – whether a law granting immunity to members of the outgoing military regime who abducted, tortured and murdered their socialist insurgent opponents should be repealed – is interesting enough. As the interviews pile up in all their eloquence and clumsiness, what comes into focus is a sharp probing of the effectiveness and potentially destructive nature of referendums, and beyond that a stand for the sanctity of democratic debate.

One punter moans ironically to Konrad of the warping effects of the media on this process – one of her film’s major concerns. She intersperses her vox pops not only with cheesy promo spots, similar to the ones in Pablo Larraín’s No (about a Chilean referendum that took place the year before), but with ads for consumer products and the underlying lust for progress with which the ruling parties hoped to dope the electorate. Konrad’s subtle and almost Socratic questioning, though, is the best expression of journalism’s true role within democracy: to make the people conscious.

Peace is the great intangible of these exchanges: what it means in a democracy, whether it’s compatible with justice. Another technique Konrad likes is simple, commentary-free shots of the streets of Montevideo. A guaranteed patience-tester as well as a buffer from Konrad’s interrogations, perhaps they are also a literal depiction of peace: the ordinary, common spaces democracy exists to protect, in which we can reflect and make the right decision.