From water shortages to food shortages, from the AIDS epidemic to genocide, the political travails of the African continent often compel the best documentary filmmakers to consciously cut through the headlines and frame their respective issues less as global crises than as intimate portraits of humanity. One such example, Newton I. Aduaka’s “Ezra,” about child soldiers being indoctrinated across Africa, opens Wednesday at Film Forum. Rather than rely on court testimony from victims, interviews with psychologists, or statistics, Mr. Aduaka brings the issue down to the level of the individual, wrapping his drama around a handful of young, shattered hearts and asking Western audiences to walk a mile in their shoes.

So it is no small irony that “A Walk to Beautiful,” which opens today at Quad Cinema, suffers from being too insular, for failing to complement its first-person viewpoints with a wider perspective of the structures and organisms that have caused so much suffering.

Directors Mary Olive Smith and Amy Bucher have found a story — a heartbreaking injustice, really — that has never been captured for a large audience. Many girls in Africa are expected to be hard laborers from a young age, put to work lifting and hauling, all the while suffering from malnutrition. Consequently, many fail to grow to their ideal height or weight, particularly in their pelvic region, meaning they are ill-equipped to give birth.

Compounding the problem, many of these girls are forced to marry as teenagers (or younger), meaning they often become pregnant before their impoverished and undersized bodies have had a chance to develop. As described frankly and horrifically by doctors in “A Walk to Beautiful,” what unfolds at the moment of birth is haunting. Carrying fetuses too large for their bodies, the women’s birth process grinds to a halt, and over a series of hours or days (one doctor says that one woman remained in labor for 10 days), they slowly give birth to stillborn boys and girls. Besides being left to cope with the loss of a child, these young women must also come to grips with the effects of a condition called obstetric fistula, which essentially allows waste from the bladder to leak from a fissure caused during delivery.

For uncomplicated cases, obstetric fistula is easily reversed with reconstructive surgery. But in Ethiopia, where Ms. Smith and Ms. Bucher have fixed their cameras on five women, roads are often days away from remote villages, and hospitals are an impossibly long journey down the roads. Abandoned by their husbands (who see them as unclean), unable to hold jobs for medical reasons, unable to converse with their peers due to fears of contagiousness, and all but shunned by their families, these women are treated as lepers. The first woman we meet in “A Walk to Beautiful” was pushed out the door by her own mother and confined to a nearby shack that her family built for its tainted offspring.

The film’s title refers to the journey undertaken by this small group of women as they walk mile after mile, day after day, to reach the hospital that may or may not be able to change their lives — a haven in the desert that welcomes these women with open arms, assuring so many that a simple surgery can make them whole again. It’s this transformation that makes “A Walk to Beautiful,” which won last year’s award for best documentary from the International Documentary Association, a captivating story of healing and hope. But as moved as we are by these women, their struggles, and their redemption, one can’t help but feel that in so closely listening to their individual nightmares, we’re missing a large part of the story.

For starters, we only get fleeting glances of women who learn that their condition is irreversible. The women at the center of the film have been tragically let down by the system into which they were born, but we aren’t given a clear enough picture of that devastating context. What’s needed to bring these firsthand accounts into relief is a larger sense of the ways in which their society is culpable in their pain — a dose of outrage to go along with the sympathy.

ssnyder@nysun.com