Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey isn’t easy to watch — and that’s the point. The new documentary from director Rachel Dretzin tells the horrifying true story of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), a polygamist Mormon denomination led by Warren Jeffs. But as Dretzin tells host Rebecca Lavoie on podcast You Can’t Make This Up, the point of the documentary isn’t to retell Jeffs’ hideous crimes — it’s to give victims and survivors a chance to tell their stories for the first time.

“Our focus [is] not only on the experience of being in that cult,” Dretzin told Lavoie. “It's on the people, particularly the women who managed to defy it and escape it, which — if you know anything about the FLDS — is a pretty miraculous and incredible thing to do.”

Keep Sweet’s four episodes feature disturbing interviews with excommunicates of the FLDS church, some of whom had intimate relationships with Jeffs, who was made prophet in 2002, inheriting the role from his father, Rulon Jeffs. By the time of his arrest, Jeffs had married 78 women (some of whom he “inherited” from his father), 24 of whom were underage — one was just 12. He also married off countless underage girls to other adult men in the group and is currently serving a life sentence for his crimes. Today, he’s still considered the prophet and president of the FLDS, and thousands of his followers remain.

Dretzin also told Lavoie that Keep Sweet is also about how anyone, even a professional skeptic like herself, could potentially be susceptible to someone else’s all-consuming belief system.

“I started realizing these women are just like us,” said Dretzin. “They were born into a very different society... but it was really revelatory to realize if I had been born into this society, I would function very similarly to the way they did.”

Dretzin also shared a behind-the-scenes look on what it was like to construct this chilling narrative, from seeing the FLDS homes where countless wives and children lived together (“They were like hotels... they’re just endless rooms”) to how her subjects helped tell their own stories in more ways than one.

“When we started working on this documentary, I didn’t know how we were going to visualize what happened, because these people weren’t allowed cellphones or allowed to go on the internet,” Dretzin said. “As it turned out, people did film... [there was] a treasure trove of archival footage from inside the FLDS [that] just existed in people’s phones and computers.”

She also said meticulous documentation is what sealed Jeffs’ fate at his trial.

“Warren Jeffs documented everything,” Dretzin revealed. “Every crime he committed, he recorded on tape, or audio or journals.”

Listen to Rachel Dretzin’s full interview with Rebecca Lavoie on this episode of the You Can’t Make This Up podcast.