Voices Beyond the Wall

James Franco served as executive producer on filmmaker Brad Coley’s haunting documentary about an oasis of safety, love, and education for girls in the middle of the murder capital of the world. Nuestras Pequeñas Rosas (Our Little Roses) in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, is a girls’ boarding school that offers a chance at life for young people in a brutal city. For many at Our Little Roses, however, that good fortune comes at a price. The Christian school and residence is full of young women abandoned by their families; in some cases, girls were deceived by their mothers into thinking that they were going to a party or visiting a friend. The emotional and psychological fallout from such inhumane treatment becomes the subject of poetry written by the girls under the tutelage of poet and Episcopal priest Spencer Reece, an American at the school on a Fulbright grant. Studying Emily Dickinson and W. H. Auden, the girls are encouraged via Reece’s empathetic but matter-of-fact approach to put their deepest emotions into words and imagery. What comes through, both in their verse and in interviews, is the students’ mixed feelings about family, while they also acknowledge that they receive so much love, protection, and a sense of sisterhood at Our Little Roses. In the film’s most powerful scene, one of the girls receives permission to visit a former student from Our Little Roses, a young teen who kept running away from the facility and ended up in a miserable orphanage, with rats, flooding, and harsh punishments. Shell-shocked, the virtual prisoner tearfully regrets leaving Our Little Roses. Bullet-riddled cars and other signs of street violence tell viewers what less-lucky children (many orphaned due to rampant drug-related murders) in the city are experiencing. What happens to the girls who graduate from Our Little Roses is an open question, but for a while at least, they get to be kids. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (T. Keogh)