Documentarian Javier Corcuera strings together three portraits of social injustice in La Espalda Del Mundo, which examines the lives of people deprived of rights at "the back of the world" (the film's English title). The documentary opens in Corcuera's home country of Peru with Guinder Rodríguez, an 11-year-old boy who works in a quarry alongside his family. Corcuera follows Rodríguez to Lima, where they encounter other pre-adolescent laborers, including a brother and sister who read newspapers aloud on city buses for spare change. The second part of La Espalda takes place in Sweden, where Kurdish Turk Mehdi Zana lives as a political refugee, separated from his wife Leyla, who has been imprisoned for championing the cause of Kurds as a member of Turkey's parliament. The film concludes in Texas with Thomas Meller-El, a death-row inmate who talks at length about other prisoners who have already been put to death. Placing convicted murderers on a moral par with dissidents and the impoverished may strike some as questionable, but Corcuera reclaims some high ground by alternating his Meller-El interview footage with a gathering of executed prisoners' families, lamenting the new set of victims that the death penalty creates. Still, Corcuera's lack of interest in any crime Meller-El may have committed does damage to the documentary's sense of perspective; though Corcuera has corrections officers walk him dispassionately through the process of lethal injection, the only real voice in favor of capital punishment belongs to a thick-accented Texan, whose sole line is "I believe in capital punishment." There are similar gaps in La Espalda's other sections. Both the Peruvian and Swedish scenes contain interview footage that's clearly been scripted (11-year-olds tend not to describe their situation with as much elegance as Rodríguez displays, and it's unlikely that Zana would vocalize his complaints about Swedish bread with the bland precision he displays here), and several moments have been staged, particularly those involving Zana's wife. Corcuera and his two credited screenwriters have crafted poetic words and scenarios, and La Espalda does a great service when it focuses on the details of the day-to-day life of its subjects, as opposed to the grand design. But the needs of that grand design impose their will upon reality, and the film has its vitality sapped. Besides, given how often journalists cover poverty and condemnation_instead of writing about the large number of middle-class South Americans, or about the people who jail others, and why they do it_Corcuera's overarching idea that he's giving a voice to the voiceless rings resoundingly hollow.