OSCAR DOCS - 3
Smile Pinki by Megan Mylan (2009) (USA/India) (40m)
Smile Pinki won the Academy Award for Best Documentary, Short Subject in 2009. Pinki is a five-year-old girl with a cleft lip who lives in a poor Indian village. Ostracized because of her birth defect, Pinki is desperate to have corrective surgery but her parents cannot afford it. A social worker arrives one day who holds out the promise of free surgery through The Smile Train program. The surgeon, Dr Singh, and Pinki herself attended the 81st Oscars night with the filmmakers. Sometimes people do good things...
Salim Baba by Tim Sternberg (2008) (USA/India) (15m)
Salim Muhammad is a 55-year-old father of five from Calcutta, India. Since the age of ten he has made a living using a manually turned projector to screen discarded film for the kids in his neighborhood. It is a little reminiscent of the much loved feature from Italy, Cinema Paradiso, and Salim Baba, unusually short for an Oscar nominee, was short-listed in 2008. Its director, Tim Sternberg, went on to make the feature film Ivory, but this was less successful.
Two Hands: Leon Fleisher by Nathaniel Kahn ('07) (USA) (17m)
Two Hands: The Leon Fleisher Story gives us an insight into the life of the eponymous American piano prodigy and conductor, who started studying the piano at the age of four but whose life disintegrated after a hand injury. Khan had in fact already been nominated for an Oscar for his feature length 2003 documentary, My Architect, which sought to understand the life of his father. Both Oscar nominations were shared with producer Susan Rose Behr.
