This Oscar-winning short film clocks in at just under forty minutes, but it packs an emotional punch. It’s a documentary following a young Indian girl named Pinki, a five year old with a cleft lip, and her journey to receive corrective surgery. This short is, in a lot of ways, an advertisement for Smile Train, a charitable organization that provides thousands of these kind of corrective surgeries a year free of charge to children who need them. And I have to say it succeeds on those terms because by the end of it you’ll be ready to pull out your wallet and give to these guys. Apparently the procedure to repair a cleft palette or a cleft lip is very simple and fast and only costs a couple of hundred dollars; but the vast majority of the cases throughout the world are among the poorest populations in places like India and Africa. And I have to admit that my understanding of the cleft palette was pretty rudimentary; some of the cases you see in this short are far worse than I knew the condition could be. I do think the film succeeds on a level that isn’t entirely commercial; they have a great subject in little Pinki who is irrepressible and resolute from the jump. Once she has the procedure (surely this isn’t a spoiler), her luminous smile lights up the screen and I couldn’t help but be touched in a sincere way. It’s got a great lead, spotlights a serious issue and those working to make things better, hits some nice emotional beats and that’s all in less than forty minutes. The Academy Awards called that a winner (Pinki traveled to Hollywood to collect the Oscar herself) and so do I. 3 ½ stars.
tl;dr – short documentary highlights a worthy charity effort to correct cleft palettes of poor children & tells a compelling story with a great lead figure at the same time; under forty minutes! 3 ½ stars.