BACK OF THE WORLD 1/2

An unflinching look at the world’s dispossessed.

In English and Spanish with subtitles. Running time: 89 minutes. Not rated (disturbing images). At the Two Boots Pioneer Theater, Avenue A and Third Street.

SPANISH director Javier Corcuera’s unflinching documentary “Back of the World” is a real-life horror story told in three parts.

Born into poverty, the subjects of this sad litany of oppression share the same fate: being deprived of basic human rights and dignity.

Guinder Rodriguez’s youth tugs at the heartstrings. The 11-year-old, who lives with his family in a shack in a village outside Lima, Peru, wakes at daybreak to toil as a stonecutter in a nearby quarry, yet never loses sight of his dream – to get an education and become an accountant.

Leyla Zana, the first Kurdish woman to be elected as a member of parliament in Turkish Kurdistan, has paid the price for a few words about peace.

During her oath of office, Zana finished her speech by tacking on a sentence in the banned Kurdish language championing harmony between peoples. She’s now serving 15 years in a prison in Ankara, Turkey.

Finally, Corcuera turns his unwavering gaze on the death row inmates of a Texas prison, where Thomas Miller-El has sat since 1986, as 10 execution dates have come and gone, each postponed by appeals.

With no tilt at a solution, and only an occasional flicker of hope, the combined weight of these tales from the back of the world produces merely helpless despair.