It is a sad, unfortunate, truth that just because a documentary deals with an important topic it doesn't mean the documentary is particularly well constructed or presented in a terribly interesting way. A good example of this is the newest Nova episode, "A Walk to Beautiful."
The episode is actually a shortened version of an award-winning, feature length documentary. Yet, without even knowing that this is approximately 30 minutes shorter than the full-length version of the documentary, one can sense that there are bits and pieces missing.
"A Walk to Beautiful" eschews the standard Nova-style narration, and while not all documentaries need a "voice of god" narrator, this one certainly could use some more direction than it has. The documentary begins by plopping the viewer down in a village in Ethiopia, miles from the nearest road, where a woman, Ayehu, explains that she has ended up with a medical problem after giving birth to a stillborn child. As she explains, liquid now runs out of her uncontrollably. She has been ostracized by her husband, family, and village due to the problem. She's even been forced to live in a straw hut of her own creation attached to the back of her family's home.
A medically trained person will be well aware that what the woman has is a fistula. A person familiar with Ethiopian culture would know that these sorts of fistulas are apparently prevalent in Ethiopia due to the lack of food and the fact that women marry and then bear children young. They might also know that the straw hut we see is attached to a slightly larger hut that appears to be made of clay and wood (at least from the oblique angles we see of it). Plus, they might be able to identify where one hut ends and the other begins without a nice establishing shot.
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1 - Josh Lasser
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