This is the inside story of how we came up with the idea of creating a movie to win an Oscar in order to raise awareness of the problem of clefts AND of our charity Smile Train – the world’s largest cleft charity.

Hard to believe our plan actually worked and our documentary Smile Train actually won an Oscar in February 2009.

Just as we had hoped, the Oscar helped us reach hundreds of millions of people around the world and raises awareness of the plight of millions of children living with unrepaired clefts.

It also helped us raise hundreds of millions of dollars for surgeries for poor children whose families could never afford it. To date, Smile Train has raised more than $1 billion in donations.

You can read all about this amazing adventure below, but first, watch Smile Pinki – it’s only 40 minutes!

https://vimeo.com/6172785

Around 2007, as our Smile Train surgeries continued to grow exponentially, so did the pressure to raise money.

At the time, we were raising more than $100 million a year by mailing more than 50 million fundraising letters and placing hundreds of Smile Train ads in newspapers and magazines every year.

Our fundraising results were off the charts for efficiency and we had more than a million very generous and loyal donors. But with our surgeries growing 10-20% a year, we were worried that our fundraising might not keep up.

I spent many a sleepless night worrying about this.

And then I watched the most amazing interview on TV with Mel Gibson about his Oscar-winning movie, The Passion. Gibson had financed his movie personally with $25 million of his own money. At the time, we had more than $50 million in the bank.

What if we produced a movie and that made Americans care about children with unrepaired clefts?

Of course, it was a crazy idea. But I learned long ago that thinking big was the only way to achieve big goals. If we wanted to help provide a 1-2 million cleft surgeries, we needed to start thinking out of the box.

Gibson’s movie The Passion won an Oscar because it is incredibly intense – and emotional.

Just like cleft surgery.

For many years, I had witnessed all over the world, the amazing and life-changing transformation cleft surgery provides.

A transformation so dramatic, I’ve watched babies being given back to their mothers after an hour away in the O.R. and the mothers do not even recognize their own baby, they shake their heads and say, “Wait a minute, you have made a mistake, this is not my child!”

A transformation so powerful that it can instantly turn tears into smiles, and despair into hope.

A transformation that saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of our Smile Train patients.

If we could capture the power, emotion and impact of cleft surgery in a film, it would turbocharge our fundraising which in turn would ensure we could solve the problem of clefts.

I wrote to all the biggest movie stars, producers, and studios in Hollywood and told them about our idea. I was certain many of them would share our enthusiasm for this project. I even got on a plane and went to Hollywood for initial meetings to discuss this project.

But it was a total waste of time. No one would meet with me. They wouldn’t even accept my calls. The best I could do was an out-of-work producer who told me she would write a script for $25,000 and she thought George Clooney should play me in the movie!

I came back to New York with my tail between my legs. I told my staff that Hollywood didn’t seem to appreciate our big idea, so it was time to go to plan B. Instead of producing a feature film about clefts, we would produce a documentary about clefts and try to win an Academy Award.

This approach would be much cheaper. Less risky. And it’s much easier to compete for an Oscar against low-budget documentaries than big budget feature films.

My staff thought I had lost my mind. Charities shouldn’t squander precious donations on making movies. We were a surgical charity and we needed to keep our focused on our mission. A movie was just going to be a big distraction, not to mention a big waste of time and money.

But I was like a dog with a bone. The more obstacles I encountered the more determined I became. Thankfully, my staff indulged me.

We put together a list of the ten best documentary directors in America who had won and/or been nominated for an Academy Award. Then we sent each of them letters telling them about our plan to try to win an Oscar for a documentary about clefts and asking if they were interested.

Seven out of the ten responded. Five submitted proposals. They were so cheap we hired not one but two directors to produce documentaries. We figured it would double our chances to win an Oscar.

We hired Oscar-winning director MaryAnn Deleo to shoot a documentary in China. Unfortunately, the Chinese Minister of Propaganda refused to give her permission to shoot in China so that was the end of that.

We hired Oscar-nominated (The Boys of Sudan) director Megan Mylan to shoot a documentary in India. We gave her the plot, the location, the surgeon, Dr. Subodh Singh – one of our best and most charismatic surgeons and even arranged for a “casting call” through a massive one-day cleft registration that brought 1,000+ children to G.S. Memorial Hospital.

That’s how Megan found Pinki Sondar.

Pinki was born with a severe cleft in an extremely poor village in northern India.

Pinki wasn’t allowed to go to school because of her cleft. She tended to the animals and stayed at home. She was so poor she never owned a pair of shoes.

Her father was a day laborer who made less than $1 dollar a day. They were one of the poorest families living in one of the poorest villages in one of the world’s poorest countries.

A social worker for our partner hospital, G.S. Memorial rode his bicycle to Pinki’s village after the registration day and we chose her for our film. He had to work hard to convince her parents and her grandmother that cleft surgery was worth the travel and the risk.

Our film follows five-year-old Pinki and her dad as they travel to Varanasi for her surgery.

 

The story is very short and simple—the film is only forty minutes long, and it doesn’t have a single word of English—but it’s an extraordinarily emotional and moving portrayal of the impact cleft surgery can have.

We see Pinki before, during and after her cleft surgery and it is like witnessing a modern-day medical miracle. It also shows the desperate poverty that billions of peasants face in developing countries all around the world.

We decided to call the film Smile Pinki because she was the star of this very simple story. (Amazingly, the first film Pinki ever saw was the one she starred in.)

Megan did a great job directing the film but there was only one problem. She finished production on week after the Oscar deadline. We begged, pleaded, and prayed for her to finish earlier but it was impossible. So, I made the executive decision to put Smile Pinki in a closet and wait till next year when we could submit it for an Oscar.

After spending around a quarter of a million dollars on this film, a lot of my staff that I was crazy to do this. And one year later, when we were rejected by the Sundance Film Festival, I began to have my own doubts.

Luckily, Smile Pinki did well at other film festivals in Montreal and D.C. and in late December 2008, we all closed our eyes and held our breath as the short list of films nominated for an Academy Award were announced in Los Angeles.

Our Smile Pinki was on the list!

At that point, Smile Pinki became a sensation. There were photos of Pinki and articles on the front page of The Times of India every day from the short list announcement until the Oscars in February. Pinki and her father and Dr. Subodh got to go to the White House of India and meet with the Prime Minister. Pinki, her father and Subodh went on a national tour around India, speaking to thousands of viewers at screenings in five cities. Pinki’s photograph was on the cover of the Times of India almost every day in the buildup to the awards.

We flew Pinki, her father, and Dr. Subodh to Los Angeles for the Oscars that February. I remember, taking them up to the roof of The Four Seasons Hotel and watching them look in amazement.

Pinki, a little girl from a poor rural village in India, had just flown on an airplane for the first time; she was wearing shoes, for the first time, and now she was taking her first ride in an elevator.

On the roof of hotel, poolside was packed with Hollywood movie stars, agents and power brokers. Nobody took notice when Pinki and her dad walked over to the swimming pool, slowly bent down and scooped up a handful of the water, and let it flow through their fingers. I am sure they both thought they were in a dream.

Later that night, our entire staff and a few of our biggest donors were huddled in a private room with a giant TV at The Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. We had been given just four tickets for the Oscar ceremony so Pinki, her dad, Subodh, and Megan the director went. We were all holding hands around the big TV when the presenter said, “And the Oscar goes to . . . Smile Pinki!”

We all roared! It was one of the happiest and most exciting moments of my life.

We all jumped up down, screamed, cried and hugged each other.

Immediately, my cell phone exploded. Hundreds of friends, donors, partners, reporters, colleagues, and relatives started calling and texting to congratulate us. I called my children who were watching at home in New York with their babysitter. They were just eight, seven, and five years old so they didn’t really understand but loved the fact they could stay up late!

For me and my staff, it was a surreal moment. All of us remembered that first meeting we had in 2007 when we decided we would produce a movie and try and win an Oscar. We all knew how many obstacles and disappointments we had to overcome to get to this point. There were many tears of joy shed in that room that night.

Just as we had hoped and dreamed, our Oscar became a game-changer for Smile Train. That night, more than a billion people heard about the problem of clefts and the plight of millions of children suffering with unrepaired clefts like Pinki.

And thankfully, they wanted to know more!

Pinki, her dad and Subodh went on ABC, CNN, Good Morning America, and all the other major networks in America. They were also interviewed and photographed by all the major newspapers and magazines. We immediately licensed the film to HBO where millions of people watched it. We also licensed it to the biggest TV network in India which has more than 900 viewers.

We wasted no time trying to raise money for surgeries which was our goal from the beginning. We sent a copy of the film to millions of our donors with appeals and delivered it to the richest one million homes in America via the USA Today newspaper.

Since the Oscar, Smile Pinki has helped Smile Train raise hundreds of millions of dollars for cleft surgeries. Smile Train earned the trust and support of more than a million new donors and total donations soared from $500 million to $1.5+ million.

Smile Pinki also exponentially raised awareness about the problem of clefts both in the West and in developing countries. Today, even in the smallest and most remote villages in India, word of Pinki’s amazing story has spread. And if you google “Smile Pinki”, you will get 26,500 hits.

We gave India’s biggest TV network, Door darshan, which has 900 million viewers, permission to broadcast Smile Pinki in perpetuity. Every time the state-owned network airs Smile Pinki, Smile Train’s Indian partner hospitals saw a large spikes in new patients.

All across India, people have learned that clefts are a birth defect, not a curse—and that they can easily be fixed, free of charge. And thanks to Pinki’s father, they have also learned that “having a daughter can be a big blessing.”

Most importantly, Smile Pinki did what we hoped it would.

It enabled Smile Train to dramatically increase the number of cleft surgeries it provides.

Since Smile Pinki won the Oscar, Smile Train’s total cleft surgeries have soared from 400,000 surgeries to more than 1.5 million surgeries.

And this number rises by 100,000 surgeries every year.

 

Every Oscar changes a career,

our Oscar helped changed

more than a million lives.