A Walk to Beautiful chronicles a silent epidemic in Africa and around the developing world: women who sustain life-changing injuries during prolonged childbirth. The women, often smaller in stature, struggle to give birth due to their size, and the resulting tear in their birth canal sentences them to a life marred by constant incontinence.

Without the proper medical care and existing in a society dictated by misconception and taboo, the women are shunned even by their family members and forced to live in a state of disgrace and alienation. The psychological harm inflicted upon these often young women is devastating.

This award-winning documentary follows several Ethiopian women who are given the hope of being cured by a special fistula clinic that only serves women like them. Completing a long and often degrading journey to the clinic is only the beginning of their road to recovery. Isolated in communities miles from the nearest road, many of the women aren’t even aware that others suffer as they do, thus the healing that they accomplish at the clinic is not only physical but emotional as well.

A Walk to Beautiful is an inspiring film that gives perspective to the concept of changing the world, one life at a time. If each of us sought to assist just one person in dire circumstances, well, wouldn’t that just be beautiful?

Grade: A

A Walk to Beautiful releases in select theaters Feb. 29.