Pinki wants to become a doctor: Megan

Oscar winning documentary filmmaker Megan Mylan talks about Smile Pinki, and how a simple surgery transformed the world of a little girl...
Megan Mylan, the Oscar winning director of Smile Pinki, who, along with a charity, took the film to five cities in the country, isn���t the kind of filmmaker who believes that her job is finished once she leaves the editing room.
For her, it���s really about getting the film out to the audiences. ���I want to motivate my audiences to take some sort of action. We have a simple message ��� a million children in this country live with clefts and they don���t need to. All of them can be given free surgery through this organisation, called the Smile Train.���
She says the hardest part is getting the word out to the patients, that ���it���s just a birth defect that can be cured and it���s no curse from God.���
Confident about making an impact on the ground, the documentary filmmaker says, ���I have already seen it. In the US, a month after the Oscars, contribution to the Smile Train doubled.��� And Pinki (the protagonist of the film), a girl from a village in Mirzapur, UP, who was not allowed to go to school and was ostracised for her cleft lip, has moved on in life after the surgery. Today, she ��� along with her four siblings ��� is studying in a school near Lucknow on a scholarship. ���Pinki, who is no longer a honth-kati, has dreams of her own. She wants to become a doctor,��� lets in Megan.
���The launch of the film in urban centres which started off with premeire screenings, and a chain of cinemas sponsoring the film in their theatres around the country did help bring in people, who have the means to take our message out even further. In case of Smile Pinki, you have an Oscar which catches people���s attention. There is something unique that happens, when a group of 200-300 people sit in a theatre and watch a movie together. You get an excitement going and the coverage of that release in theatres does trickle down to the village, so when a person in a village hears about a documentary, he or she might have heard something about the Smile Pinki Oscar. I am amazed by how many taxi drivers have heard about Smile Pinki,��� says Megan.
As for her remark that it would be icky getting Pinki for the Oscars, she clarifies that she feared it would be. ���It���s not that we didn���t want her along for the party, but we didn���t want to expose her to such a crazy world. The decision was left to Pinki and her parents, and she came.���
Post her Oscar win, says Megan, things remain pretty much the same. ���The Oscar hasn���t radically changed my career. It definitely made more people see Smile Pinki and that helps people give attention to your grand proposals. But I had a grand rejection within days of the Oscar. I was asking for some funding for one of my projects but it wasn���t accepted. Documentaries are not Hollywood or Bollywood. It is a very small industry, very limited dollars. I���ve other friends who have won Oscars before me, but you still have to work hard. You still have to do this, because you can���t imagine doing anything else. That���s the case with me too.��� Talking about her filmmaking style, she says, ���I love to make films that are character driven. I identify an issue that interests me and then figure if there is an interesting way to make a story about it. It���s not just education, it���s moviemaking, and I want people to be entertained, to be emotionally connected and moved. There is no narrator, no interviews in my films. You are watching life happening in front of the camera. Smile Pinki is not really a film about clefts. It���s about a girl Pinki, who thinks she is going to live her whole life with this cleft, and then she travels to the big city, goes into an hour of surgery and returns to her village completely changed. It���s a real world fairy tale. I could tell a very specific story about Pinki and Dr Subodh Kumar (who conducted the surgery) and at the same time tell a larger story about this issue of clefts.���
Megan, who has combined her two passions ��� activism and filmmaking ��� says, ���When I am making films, I am not thinking as an activist. While on the field, it���s about creating good cinema.���
You can spread the message by making something interesting. ���Maybe people walk out of the theatre saying it was a really entertaining documentary. And the next time they just might be willing to buy a ticket to see a documentary. That���s what���s happening in the US in the last five to ten years, with people actually buying a movie ticket on a Friday night to see a documentary.���
As for the unusual subject she chose for her documentary, she says, ���Stories seem to find me and in this case it literally did. The Smile Train had been given a grant for communication work. They had seen my previous movie Lost Boys Of Sudan and wanted me to make a movie. Once I understood their work, I believed in their cause.���
As for the most powerful experience while making the film, Megan says it was watching Pinki���s father and Ghutaru���s mother (another character in the film), when the kids came out after the surgery. It was like a tremendous weight had lifted from their shoulders,��� says the filmmaker who is now working on a film on racial equality in Brazil.