An Oscar winner, 40 minute documentary about a girl with cleft lip from rural India ‘Smile Pinki’, is all set to be screened across the country.  

The crew member of the movie is on a five city tour, and would travel to Chennai, Bangalore, New Delhi and finally move to Pinki Sonkar’s native city Varanasi. The promotional tour is joined by the doctor, child actors and doctors who operated cleft lip surgery.  

While talking to reporters, Satish Kalra, MD of Smile Train said, “We did an extra 1,500 surgery in the month following the Oscar. However, we are back to performing 4,000 surgeries a month now.”

Pinki won an Academy Award for telling her story. The 40 minute documentary was made by US-based director Megan Mylan. It showed that how the girl born in a poor family with a cleft lip and then taken by a social worker to a hospital that provides free surgery to fix the deformity for thousands of needful children each year,

The filmmaker said, “I think, if Indian audience gives Indian documentaries a chance, they'll be surprised how entertaining they are.”

Mr. Singh said, “I expect that the audience will understand the cause for which this film was made and the cause of the cleft children. And they will come forward to help these children and spread awareness and bring more such patients to hospital.”

Mr. Singh has performed as many as 13,000 corrective surgeries at his hospital in Varanasi since 2005. He has done this with the help of the US-based charity ‘Smile Train’, which aids cleft lip surgery. There are 165 hospitals in India, which provides cleft lip surgery. The NGO has 250 surgeons, which jointly perform about 4000 surgeries every month.