Voices Beyond the Wall: Twelve Love Poems from the Murder Capital of the World (2017)

In the winter of 2012, Spencer Reece, an award winning American poet and Episcopal priest, came to live at Honduras' only girls' orphanage for a year. On a Fulbright grant to teach the girls poetry and help them create a book of their own work, he found himself immersed in a profoundly challenging environment. His attempts to teach the girls were largely rebuffed- poetry is too difficult, personal, and boring they insist. At the end of Spencer's year, a book of the girls' poems has taken shape and he returns to the United States to edit and publish it. The writings are moving and complex, operating both as emotional touchstone and an inspiration for the mosaic structure of the film itself. The range of subjects are varied but return often to the nature of love and family, the pain of betrayal, and the mothers they lost or never had. Always a central back-drop is the frightening world that awaits them outside the thick steel gate. This film, like the poems within it, opens a door to an intimate universe. Voices will be heard, clearly and at long last, by a country that had no place for them and a world that, until now, has turned a deaf ear. For in the histories and hearts of these girls resonate quandaries that have drawn poets for millennia and are no less vital today. And in their emerging voices and lives there is something else revealed: a hope and a challenge; that the world might be home to us all.