A scene from A Gay Girl in Damascus: The Amina Profile (SundanceNow Doc Club)

Abduction can be a tool of terror, employed by political regimes to silence opposing viewpoints and conceal the truth. It is ironic that in the case of Amina Arraf, the name of a Syrian blogger allegedly abducted for her political views and homosexuality, the act of abduction revealed rather than obfuscated the truth. Ironic, too, that the silencing of Amina is arguably the best thing that ever happened to her.

If that sounds mysterious, it is appropriately so. The twists and turns of A Gay Girl in Damascus: The Amina Profile are too thrilling to spoil here (even if the viewer, as a National Public Radio listener, knows the story). It is a compelling, engaging documentary where truth is stranger than a spy novel, and it has much to say about the peaks and pitfalls of the Internet age. While the best way to encounter it may be without any preconception, a little background won’t hurt.

Amina began an online relationship with Sandra Bagaria, a French woman living in Montreal, during the Arab Spring in 2011. She and Amina chatted, sexted, and sent pictures. When exciting anti-government protests began to spread around the Middle East, Amina started writing the blog from which this film gets its title. “I want to be an example to others,” she wrote, referring to her open sexuality in a closed culture.

She was. Other blogs and media began to pick up on her story. Her blog personalized politics, putting a (beautiful) face on a faraway issue. Amina could be breathless about the possibilities blooming—“What a time to be alive!”—and realistic about the dangers faced by those like her. When the secret police came to visit her house, her father became an Internet hero for how he protected his daughter.

Then she was kidnapped and everything changed.

There’s a bit of the best of All the President’s Men to what comes next as the film traces the efforts of a handful of journalists piecing together a puzzle. Where is Amina, they ask, and, more troublingly, who is Amina? Even Bagaria, who has exchanged half a year’s worth of intimacies with Amina, must come to the conclusion that she may not really know her.

As Amina becomes front page news, the Syrian Revolution takes a backseat. The stories of those who are genuinely suffering are discarded in favor of the history of one who has caused others pain and embarrassment. The journalists ask, isn’t that always the case? Don’t we become consumed by the hows and wherefores of our perpetrators, the troublemakers, and lose sight of the victims? “They are dying in the dark,” one man says of the Syrians, now that the news has moved on.

There is undoubtedly a villain in the Amina case. Thankfully, there may no longer be any victims, at least here, because of the actions of those affected by Amina’s plight, who uncovered what actually happened. By illuminating this difficult process of understanding, A Gay Girl in Damascus makes the leap from a gaudy headline into a powerful testament.