Oscar-winning documentary 'Smile Pinki' screened in Delhi

New Delhi, Oct 9 (ANI): Oscar-winning documentary 'Smile Pinki', that gives the message about the cleft surgery in India was premiered in New Delhi on Thursday.

Six-year-old Pinki is the star of the short documentary "Smile Pinki", which won an Academy Award.

The 39-minute poignant film, by U.S.-based filmmaker Megan Mylan, recounts how the girl, born into a poor family and with a cleft lip, is taken by a social worker to a hospital that provides free surgery to fix the deformity for thousands of children each year.

Pinki was once an outcast in her village, 50 km south of Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh, where deformities are not understood, but she was accepted into the community after the surgery.

Mylan said that her life has changed after the documentary.

"It's changed because I am here, I am part of this. I am getting to connect with audience in India. I am getting to give this Indian story back to India, maybe helping extend the excitement of the Oscar a little bit. And then send it out into this beautiful vast country to take the story everywhere. That's once in a lifetime experience for me to take the story everywhere," she said.

Subodh Kumar Singh, the doctor who performed free surgery on Pinki's cleft, also arrived along with Mylan. He has performed 13,000 corrective surgeries at his hospital in Varanasi since 2005 with the help of the U.S.-based charity Smile Train, which aids cleft lip surgery.

There are 165 Smile Train hospitals all across India that provides free surgery to cleft patients. The NGO with 250 surgeons performs about 4,000 surgeries every month.

The documentary has been earlier screened in Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore. (ANI)