Aidan Delgado turned in his machine gun. He didn’t turn it in to the armorer at a stateside base. He turned it into his commanding officer in Iraq. He would stay for the rest of his tour, he said, but he would not kill again.

Delgado is one of the soldiers in Soldiers of Conscience, a wonderful film that will be shown this week at the Rhode Island International Film Festival and will probably never be shown at your local multiplex.

The film looks at the question that faces all who go into combat: Will they do what they’ve been trained to do when the time comes to kill another human being? The question hasn’t claimed much of a place in the debate over the war in Iraq. Maybe that’s because with an all-volunteer force there’s the easy assumption that those who volunteer accept the hard choices that have to be made.

But there are people like Delgado, who see things in Iraq for which no amount of training could prepare them. And they say “no more.” They become conscientious objectors.

Catherine Ryan, who produced and directed Soldiers of Conscience with her husband, Gary Weimberg, began looking at the way the troops were dealing with the question of killing in Iraq after looking at the way troops dealt with it in another war. She and Weimberg met a lawyer in Berkeley, Calif., who had represented conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War.

“I wondered what had happened to them,” she said during an interview from her home in California. “And in doing the research on conscientious objectors in the Vietnam War, I found it’s going on now in this war.”

Ryan used to live in Rhode Island. She attended Barrington High School and Salve Regina. She met Weimberg at the University of California at San Diego. He was in filmmaking. She was in sociology. He took her to see documentaries.

“It was sociology applied,” she said.

They have made eight feature-length documentaries as well as shorter films in the last 20 years. Last year, they won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary for the historical film Three Women and a Chateau at the Rhode Island festival.

This year, they are back with something very different. Soldiers of Conscience is one of those films that remind us what a rich opportunity the annual film festival has become to see the kind of deeply personal, sometimes quirky and offbeat films that take us places and introduce us to people we’re just not going to see in big studio productions. Four years ago, John Hulme brought his Unknown Soldier to the festival. It was his story and his father’s story. It was the story of Hulme going back to his Pawtucket roots and retracing the life of his father, who was killed in Vietnam in 1969. It was eventually shown on HBO.

Also on the schedule this year is The Dhamma Brothers, a fascinating look inside a maximum-security prison in Alabama where hard-core inmates find a sense of peace and self-awareness through ancient meditation techniques. The prison gym is turned into a monastery and 36 inmates walk into it for a retreat that will test their ability to confront the things they’ve done and the people they’ve become.

As I said, the festival is not your run-of-the-mill movie fare. And Soldiers of Conscience is not just another one-way look at the evils of the Iraq war. It isn’t about just conscientious objectors. It is about how people deal with that central question of going to war. It reminds us that the burdens soldiers and Marines carry in the desert heat are far more complex and long lasting than we can possibly know.

“We didn’t want to do just one side,” said Catherine Ryan. “We talked to sincere war fighters.”

And one of those sincere war fighters, a West Point graduate, reminds us during the film that sometimes people have to kill to protect the things that truly matter.

Ryan and Weimberg began working on the film two years ago. They lined up investors who were drawn more by the subject of the film than its money-making potential. Ryan said there was a “lot of conversation” with military officials to gain the access she and her husband needed.

So we see soldiers in boot camp yelling “Kill, kill, kill” during bayonet drills. We hear from a soldier who tells of having to shoot a 10-year-old boy who was throwing grenades, and another who tells of going to the “heart of darkness” and doing things he regrets and wondering whether he will ever again be the person he used to like.

There is a lot of Iraq in this film. We see faces of Iraqi children and women, telling us of the horror without a word spoken.

This is not a film to take the kids to. But it is an important addition to the discussion.

Ryan points out that at the end of the Vietnam War, there were 170,000 conscientious objectors. There was one major difference between then and now — the draft. Many of the CO applications then were made in advance of the draft notice showing up in the mail. But there was a lot of information available then, too, and there isn’t much now. Ryan said she believes those who fight today’s war should know there is an option, something they can do if they decide way down deep that they can’t kill.

Soldiers of Conscience will be shown Thursday at 3 p.m. at the Columbus Theater, at 270 Broadway, Providence.

bkerr@projo.com