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| Waiting for their turn at the Oscars |
| Neha Bhatt / New Delhi Feb 22, 2009, 00:04 IST |
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Two Indian documentaries also hope to bring back the famed statuette.
A long with child actors of Slumdog Millionaire, Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail, nine-year-old Pinki from Mirzapur, UP, will also walk the red carpet on Sunday night, rooting for her own film Smile Pinki at the Oscars. While the jury is still divided on whether the slums of Mumbai in Slumdog Millionaire are quite as representative of real India as is believed, Smile Pinki and another documentary, The Final Inch — both nominated in the Documentary Short category — are as Indian as they come.
It’s a grimmer, more factual India in these documentaries. In The Final Inch, for instance, the camera follows individuals who travel the country to urge parents to vaccinate their children against polio. In a larger perspective The Final Inch, directed by documentary maker Irene Taylor Brodsky, takes a look at global efforts in eradicating the disease worldwide. Brodsky met several public health workers and polio survivors, both in India and in the US, and one such young man is polio-affected Mohammed Gulzar Saifi, who has been profiled in this film.
Brodsky, who spent two days shooting with him, agrees that working on a subject that can be so intrinsically native (while continuing to also be a global issue) can be challenging to film for a foreigner. “We encountered some cultural challenges, but none that we could not solve as a team. We went inside many Muslim homes, particularly in Meerut.
Since men are not welcome in the home during the day when the men of the house are not present, I often had to take the camera since my cinematographer was male. Conversely, when we shot inside mosques, as a woman I was not allowed to enter. So we were all required to be flexible to accommodate the scene,” explains Brodsky.
In Smile Pinki, documentary maker Megan Mylan brings together images of Pinki, a little girl who is virtually a social outcast due to a cleft lip condition (a birth defect where a gap occurs in the upper lip), till she is treated for it by Smile Train, an international organisation that provides free surgeries to victims of this condition across the world.
Smile Pinki follows this little girl’s life (also treated by Smile Train’s efforts) through and after the surgery, a transformation that is as heartwarming as it is hopeful. Over 1, 50,000 such surgeries have been provided for cleft lip condition in India, and over 4, 00,000 worldwide by this organisation. It is a condition that mainly remains untreated due to poverty. “What most people don’t realise is that clefts are really much more of an economic problem than a medical one,” says Dr Subodh Kumar Singh, the surgeon who treated Pinki.
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