Bhutto is not a Hollywood movie, but it has all the elements, and the emotional impact, of a heart-rending biopic. The filmmakers are clearly devoted to their heroine, and on a mission to enshrine her legacy. Yet they go out of their way to give voice to some of her harshest critics—including the niece who accused her of murder, the New York Times journalist John Burns who exposed her family’s alleged corruption, and Musharraf, who may have enabled her assassination. Duane Baughman, the film’s producer and co-director, says he overrode fierce objections from the Bhutto family in putting her detractors on camera. “I didn’t have anything to gain by making a puff piece,” he told Maclean’s. “The accusations made the story thicker, more interesting, and more like the Greek tragedy that it really is.” Siegel expressed a more pragmatic motive: “I wanted it to be credible.”

Baughman, who financed its US$3-million budget from his own pocket, had never made a film. Nor had Siegel. Both men were Democatic party stalwarts connected to Bhutto. Siegel, who co-wrote her last book, Reconciliation, served as deputy assistant to president Jimmy Carter and as executive director of the Democratic National Committee. He says he first met Bhutto in 1984 when he and his wife were asked to throw a Washington dinner party for “a friend who had just got out of prison.” They became “very close,” he says. “Pakistanis treated her as a goddess and she loved having Western friends who would argue with her.” Siegel, who is interviewed on camera, may be the only producer to shed tears in his own film.

Baughman, his co-producer, never met Bhutto. A high-powered political consultant, he has masterminded direct-mail campaigns in election races for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton. “I’m absolutely an outside-the-Hollywood-mould kind of guy,” he says, explaining he got involved with Bhutto when an anonymous group of Americans asked him to help get her elected for a third term in 2007. Three weeks later she was dead. Three months after that, he was in Dubai, filming in her living room.

With screenwriter Johnny O’Hara serving as co-director, Baughman has assembled a freight-train narrative, not just of Bhutto and her family, but of Pakistan’s turbulent history. He draws on poignant testimony from her family, including her three children, and on such commentators as Tariq Ali, Condoleezza Rice and Bhutto’s Oxbridge pal Arianna Huffington. But the most eloquent voice is Bhutto’s. She’s brought vividly to life, not just in clips, but in audio salvaged from 50 hours of interviews that she did for her autobiography. Siegel tracked down the tapes, which had been rotting in a shoebox in a Long Island beachhouse, damaged by two decades of sea air. He had them restored with Hollywood wizardry, and her ghostly voice from those tapes sounds like she’s narrating the documentary from the grave.

The film begins and ends with graphic footage of the two bomb attacks against her in 2007. The first occurs on Oct. 18, when she returns home in triumph after eight years in exile. As night falls, her caravan inches through a joyous and endless throng estimated at up to three million people. Bhutto waves to the crowd, refusing to stay behind a sheet of bulletproof glass. But with the approach of her truck, the street lights systematically go out, as if to provide cover for her assassins. Then two explosions shatter the night, leaving at least 140 dead. An observer remembers being showered with what felt like “heavy rose petals”—human flesh. Police immediately hose down the street, washing away the forensic evidence.

Bhutto survives and revisits Dubai for just two days. Her daughters tearfully recall how they begged her to stay. She left them gifts for upcoming birthdays and said God would decide whether she lived or died. Cut to the fatal Dec. 27 rally. Bhutto’s voice from one of those early interviews eerily plays over footage of her leaving the podium: “I feel the love of the crowd come toward me and I feel completely protected . . . no bullet can hit me. In this crowd, in this rush, I feel the martyrs come with me. We’re all walking together.”

It’s as if Bhutto had surrendered to the cult of personality that surrounded her. And in her extreme sacrifice, there’s a tragic irony: Islam’s extremists, her mortal enemies, also put their faith in martyrdom. In Bhutto’s case it took a martyr to create one.

The family blood feud, like the political one, remains unresolved. Benazir’s 21-year-old son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, is now chairman of her party and plans to lead it once he finishes his Oxford education. Her beautiful and embittered niece still believes her aunt has Papa’s blood on her hands. Fatima has chosen the safer road of journalism over politics, for now. But she is still young.