Everybody seems to be talking of Slumdog Millionaire and its hopes of bagging a couple of Oscars. But there is another little Indian story, which is also hoping to create history at the Oscars. The film in concern is American documentary filmmaker Meg Mylan’s Smile Pinki.
This year there will be two films with Indian protagonists. It seems to be an Indian season at the Oscars. Mylan’s Smile Pinki has been nominated in the Short Documentary section. Mylan’s film deals with a little girl who has a cleft lip. The 40 minute documentary details how Pinki’s life changed after a global initiative called Smile Train performed a free cleft removal operation. Mylan, recounts how she seemed to be destined to come to India and make a film. An independent filmmaker, she says that she has never allowed anyone to dictate the kind of subjects she should make a film on but when she was shown the work which was being done by doctors in India on cleft lips by Smile Train, she was intrigued enough to give it a shot. What really surprised the filmmaker was the kind of ostracism that people with cleft lips faced in India. Smile Pinki has been shot in Mirzapur in Uttar Pradesh. The director was based in Varanasi and would travel two hours everyday for a period of three weeks, the duration it took her to complete the film as she did not want to burden the villagers by staying with them. The director is not new to the Oscars. Mylan was a part of the feature documentary, Long Night’s Journey Into Day, which was nominated for best feature documentary in 2000, but failed to clinch the Oscar. She may just have turned lucky this time with Smile Pinki. After all, India is the flavour of the season.
