Its a known fact that the movie Slumdog millionaire got 8 oscars including that of best music for A.R. Rehman and made our Country pride, but we should not forget the documentary movie Smile Pinky which bagged best documentary film award. As here I am mentioning because its a role of a doctor and a role of a patient on which the film is based. The disease by which Pinky suffered is called cleft lip.
The movie : Smile Pinky
"Smile Pinky" is a 39 minutes documentary film made by made by Megan Mylan who is an American filmmaker. He made this for Smile Train, an international organisation that does free surgeries for cleft-lip patients all over the world.
The movie is based on a small girl who looks beautiful but has cleft lip. Her family contains five person and reside in a villge. This cleft lip makes her aloof and she is often teased by her friends leading to a suppressed Pinky without having normal childhood fun. The term smile is used as the patient with cleft lip is unable to smile or laugh with full expression of joy.
What is cleft lip
There are several children who are like Pinky suffering from cleft lip and cleft palate all over the world. In majority of cases Cleft lip results from abnormal development of the medial nasal and maxillary processes at the time that they bulge down wards in front of and below the nasal pit and when their surfaces should touch, the epithelia over them fuse and then break down. In minor degrees of cleft lip the dificiency appears on mainly of tisues of medial nasal process. Cleft lip also leads to dislocation of tongue thus interfereing in speech , dentition and sometimes hearing is also impaired.
Is cleft lip treatable
Those who have seen the documentary movie Smile pinky must be surprised by seeing the change in look of small baby Pinky before and after surgery. Plastic surgeons are able to operate and close the defect with minimal scar and the person looks as good as normal.
The ideal time to repair cleft lip is at 10 weaks after birth. Later the defect will be closed, more will be the scar mark and more difficult to attain full recovery.
Smile Train is an international organisation that does free surgeries for cleft-lip patients all over the world.
The documentary movie have highlighted the problem of cleft lip children and made people think that these children too can have a smile on their face if taken care of in proper time at proper place.
For more details, visit http://dr-healthguide.blogspot.com
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| Author: kondaveeti nagaraju 22 Apr 2009 | Member Level: Silver Points : 2 |
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Lucknow, Feb 23 (IANS) The plastic surgeon who operated on Pinki Sonkar, the protagonist of “Smile Pinki” which has bagged the best short documentary Oscar, Monday said the award is for thousands of little cleft-lipped girls like her who are waiting to emerge out of anonymity.
“This award is not just for Pinki but for the thousands of Pinkis who are waiting to emerge out of a life of anonymity,” Subodh Kumar Singh, who performed corrective surgery on the village girl, told IANS from Los Angeles.
Varanasi-based Singh has accompanied Pinki and her father Rajender Sonkar - who hail from Rampur Dabai village in Uttar Pradesh’s Mirzapur district - to the Oscars and was speaking immediately after the ceremony.
The 39-minute documentary has been made by American filmmaker Megan Mylan for Smile Train, an international organisation that does free surgeries for cleft-lip patients all over the world. There are 4.7 million cleft-lip children in the developing world who need this surgery. One million of these live in India.
“One out of 700 in India is a cleft-lip patient. There are 35,000 new cleft-lip cases every year in the country,” explained Singh, happy that the Oscar nomination has brought to fore the plight of cleft-lip patients forced to lead a life of neglect and disrespect.
The documentary with sub-titles in English has captured in camera Pinki before and during her one-hour surgery showing a completely transformed girl, who is today happy and confident.
Pinki’s family has five children, including her. Pinki’s birth in this poor family right from the beginning was a source of great humiliation for the entire family. Villagers had called Pinki’s cleft-lip deformity a curse on the family.
A jubilant Singh said they would return to India Wednesday and he was looking forward to his work with “renewed vigour and enthusiasm.”
The credit for selecting Pinki as the protagonist of the film goes to Singh. He has deep affection for Pinki, who was once a depressed girl and an introvert suffering from an inferiority complex due to her facial deformity.
The doctor had chosen her for this documentary because he found her face “beautiful” except for the cleft-lip. He knew it would require just 45 minutes of his labour to restore her complete beauty and he knew his scalpel had the power to do so.
Reconciled to her fate of living on the fringes, for Pinki the film was a technicolour delight. The surgery brought forth a metamorphosis in Pinki, who was six years old at that time. Today she is a normal child and above all she smiles - something she had not done for a long time.
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