A grim slate of documentaries opens today at Film Forum, bearing respectful witness to three extremes of human experience: child prostitution in Thailand, a Nepalese leper community, and the grisly burial rituals of a Tibetan monastery. Grouped together, these sensitive works by the filmmaker Ellen Bruno are a triptych about body and spirit, provoking a welter of emotions through their wrenching subject matter.

The shortest of the three films, “Sky Burial,” is also the strongest as a piece of cinema (and with “Leper” the most recent, both released in 2005). With a calm, unflinching eye, Ms. Bruno chronicles the “jhator” funeral ritual performed at the Drigung Monastery. Not unlike the Zoroastrians, who believe the human soul vacates the body’s shell after death, these Tibetans leave the bodies of their loved ones exposed, to be consumed by vultures. The act both connotes generosity toward another living being (“jhator” means “alms-giving to the birds”) and unites the individual with the great beyond.

Ms. Bruno’s discreet long shots bring death much closer than in the Western tradition of preparations behind closed doors. Even the beginning of the rites introduces a palpably different relationship with the dead: Each desiccated body is toted like a backpack to an open terrace where chanting monks await. The bodies are then stripped of flesh and the bones crushed and mixed with barley grain.

Ms. Bruno’s film is devoid of sensationalism or any attempt to adorn or explicate the spirituality of these acts besides some opening lines of text. Even as throngs of toddler-size vultures press forth in anticipation of the bodies, Ms. Bruno’s shots are so carefully composed, timed, and edited that they make possible an empathetic, unintrusive encounter, unavoidably awed but not voyeuristic.

Her craft demonstrates that the sacred in the cinema won’t always involve shafts of light. Ms. Bruno’s urge to document clearly but compassionately is attributable to extensive experience as a relief worker in Southeast Asia for such organizations as the International Rescue Committee. (Her very first film, “Samsara,” completed in 1990 for a master’s degree at Stanford in documentary, chronicled life in Cambodia after Pol Pot.)

Her access to the sky burial ritual also testifies to great trust — a huge factor in “Sacrifice.” This earlier work, shown at Sundance and on PBS in 1998, consists of interviews with underage Burmese prostitutes. The villagers, displaced by the government and lured into sex slavery in Thailand, tell stories that plumb awful depths of despair. It’s impossible to turn away as one woman recounts wanting an abortion out of fear that her unborn daughter would suffer the same fate. (Her master, with unspeakable offhand cruelty, promised as much.)

The prostitutes’ interminable circle of forced debt and degradation forms a grotesque inverse to the liberating cycle of the sky burial. Instead of merging with the infinite, these teenagers live a hell on earth; one illiterate girl asks the interviewer to do the math behind her enslavement, arriving at a tally of thousands of men.

The girls’ trapped existence puts a line of introductory text from “Sky Burial” expressing Tibetan perspective in a terrible new light: “Everyone before you has died.” Where there the sentiment comforted by emphasizing the community of the dead rather than the solitude of dying, it echoes here as a hopeless matter of fact concerning their prospects.

Perhaps because of the unrelenting litany of grief, Ms. Bruno intersperses the interviews with brief lyrical passages. These impressionistic glimpses of village life — a twirling doll-like dancer, swaying bamboo — limn the tales of horror with memories of beauty and the sanctuary of home. A concertedly flat voice-over accompanies them, as if to present a generic voice or simply to represent those absent, but that effect is uneven and distracting. The girls, at varying stages on the way to becoming shells of themselves, are enough.

“Sacrifice” almost bows under the weight of its suffering, and only in a program like this would a film called “Leper” offer some solace. A looser affair, it features interviews with lepers who avoid ostracism elsewhere by living together. Despite their disease (which one man describes as feeling “like insects inside me”), the afflicted have clearly attained some equanimity through community and newfound autonomy.

It’s a testament to Ms. Bruno’s grace, if that’s the word, that she can present the often wrenching material in these three documentaries with integrity. Her filmmaking in “Sky Burial” shows an elegance and lucidity that one hopes will continue to evolve. It would help give approachable form to the raw tragedy of works like “Sacrifice,” which bring focus to distant troubles.

Through January 9 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8112).