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Smile Pinki – Beautiful, Touching

Pinki, a young Indian girl, looks into a mirror. She contemplates her cleft lip, playing with her pigtails. Five years old, she can’t go to school because she has been made fun of by the other children in her Indian community. Several weeks later, she once again looks in a mirror, this time, from a hospital bed. Her cleft lip and cleft palate have been repaired for free. Her father is ecstatic, smiling, laughing. She can’t stop staring. Months later, she sits in a classroom, white shirt, blue skirt, happy to be learning, to be surrounded by friends.

Smile Pinki, directed by Megan Mylan, is the Academy Award-winning documentary premiering Wednesday, June 3 at 7 PM on HBO, that tells Pinki’s story. Following Pinki and a young boy, Gutharu, the documentary traces their fairy tale story as they travel from their small villages to the city of Banaras, Uttar Pradesh, for a life-changing surgery.

Cleft palate is one of the most common defects among newborns around the world, and is most commonly found among those children born into poverty. The exact cause of the defect is not known, but it is thought to be a result of poor nutrition. The Smile Train is a U.S.-based non-profit that provides doctors in 76 countries around the world with the means to provide free cleft palate surgery on children who otherwise could not afford it. Though The Smile Train’s staff consists of only 42 staff, their organization oversees more than 100,000 completely free cleft palate surgeries per year thanks to the generosity of donors.

What Smile Pinki accomplishes is several-fold. It highlights the important work of The Smile Train, showing how a surgery can change someone’s life. It does not provide any narration – rather, it highlights the plight of the poverty stricken and the prejudices held against those born with cleft palate. The film captures mothers blaming the cleft palate on eclipses when they were pregnant and children ostracizing those with cleft palates, calling them “monster” and “split lip.” It also illuminates the enormous effort that The Smile Train puts together. The hospital and cleft palate surgery center in the film is one of 160 in India alone. The sheer scale of the operation, and the massive numbers of children still living with cleft palate is both dizzying and humbling.

Smile Pinki is a call to help. It highlights the good that an organization does without preaching. It is beautiful and touching and is a film that I heartily recommend that everyone see.
   –  Geoff Calver


Children of the Stars

Children of the Stars showcases Stars and Rain school, an extraordinary NGO just outside Beijing, China, that educates parents about behavior adaptation and care for their autistic children.

Founded by Tian Hui Ping, a parent of an autistic child, Stars and Rain’s 11-week program is unique to China, where stigma of the disease is high and access to services very limited. With no cure available for the disease, care and education are the only option for autistic families.

Just like the school, the film focuses on the parents - their frustration, fears, vulnerability, hope, and dedication, as they work to assuage their child’s autistic condition and to build a future for their families.

The filmmakers wisely dedicate long sequences of the film, without narration and dialogue, to show how autistic children interact with the world and the process parents go through with their children to reach basic results. These scenes are both exhausting and beautiful. You cannot leave this film without an intense respect for the parents and teachers that impart such love, compassion and quality of care on their seemingly imperfect children.

Produced by Alexander Haase, and directed by Rob Aspey, the film is distributed by Fanlight Productions. To learn more about the film and to donate to the school, visit the website.

- Megan Galbraith

The Writing On My Forehead

The Writing On My Forehead (Harper Collins), by Nafisa Haji, is a beautifully wound debut novel that explores family ties, melding traditions, and Indo-Pakistani culture across several continents. Haji handily delivers the story of Saira Qader, a young, Indo-Pakistani girl growing up in Los Angeles. The novel opens mysteriously, with Saira gazing upon her niece, recalling a horrid dream that repeats night after night. It then diverges into memories of the past, upon which the majority of the novel is built. The Writing On My Forehead is broad and takes place over the course of many years and many countries. It follows Saira as she ages from a child to an ambitious, successful journalist, to September 11, and the months following its devastating effects. Across this wide spectrum of scenes, conflicts and advances in time, a common thread holds the novel to its form. Saira is bound to her family. While the novel follows Saira from a first-person perspective throughout, it also manages to expose who her parents are, who her aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents are, how their lives and traditions have a bearing upon those of their children, and how cultures blend slowly into one another. The Writing On My Forehead is organic. The Qader family and their relatives are alive, each different, each with their flaws, and each with a story to tell. The cultural bearing of the novel is at the same time mesmerizing and eye opening, and is made all the more poignant in the climactic scenes of the book, in which, Saira, while in Pakistan, witnesses the destruction of the twin towers and the collision of many cultures, religions and peoples. The novel brings to bear the ripple effects of Sept. 11. In the end, it is a treat due to the simplicity of the story and the beautiful, stirring and surprising revelations at its conclusion. Haji managed to write a novel that is sparse, intimate, and beautiful. It reveals a culture with an eye for detail and simplicity, and it winds a fascinating story within its pages. The Writing On My Forehead is widely available in hardcover. Read an excerpt of this novel.

 - Geoff Calver

 

Women are Heroes

TRAILER ” WOMEN ARE HEROES” by JR

Throughout the Providencia slum in Rio de Janeiro, one of the most violent in Brazil, black and white photos of women’s faces have been plastered onto the facades of homes and apartment-blocks. In Kenya, 2,000 square feet of rooftops and train cars have been covered with the eyes and faces of Kebera women. These portraits visible from space have also been captured on Google Earth. French graffiti artists, turned photographer, and identified only as JR has pronounced “Women are Heroes” traveling to areas struck by extreme violence, rape, murder and war in recognition of our common humanity. In collaboration with the NGO Medecins Sans Frontière (Doctors without Borders), and armed with his 28 millimeter lens, JR has taken simple portraits of women whose faces range from the reflective to the silly. The Women project aims to underline their pivotal role, transforming these photos into an exhibition, to highlight women’s dignity by shooting them in daily life and posting them on the walls throughout their countries. So far his street galleries have reached Sierra Leon, the Sudan, Kenya, Liberia and Brazil turning villages and train-tracks into an opened-spaced celebration of women. On March 10, JR brought his exhibition to Belgium where eight photos have been placed on eight different buildings throughout Brussels. These photos will remain in place for a month before moving on to the Tate Modern in London, Carthagena, Spain, and the Rath Musem, in Geneva, Switzerland. According to JR, the expressions on these women’s faces capture their courage and determination to not only live but to exist. To learn more, visit http://www.28millimetres.com/women/

- Cassidy Flanagan


The Space Between Us - A Classic

The Space Between Us (Harper Perennial), by Thrity Umrigar, is a poignant, beautifully written, and haunting study of contrasts in modern-day India. Set in the sprawling city of Mumbai, the plot follows the intertwined lives of Bhima, a servant, and Sera Dubash, her middle-class, Parsi employer. Bhima lives in the slums of Mumbai, and has never had an easy life. Her husband lost three fingers in an accident, and she, taken advantage of by the company accountant because of her illiteracy, signs away their rights to compensation. Her daughter moves to New Delhi with her husband, where they contract AIDS. Bhima adopts their daughter, who becomes pregnant while attending college on the generosity of Sera Dubash. To Bhima, the life of Sera Dubash seems wonderful. There is no poverty in Sera’s life, no open sewers around her house, no drunkards lying in mud. But Sera Dubash has also lived a difficult life - an abusive husband and mother-in-law, and a son-in-law with a dark secret lie hidden behind her wall of privacy. Sera and Bhima have tea together and open their hearts to each other. Yet, as close as they are emotionally, India’s caste system separates them. It is this world of contrasts and similarities that Thrity Umrigar brings so beautifully to life in The Space Between Us. “I’ve been writing this book forever,” says Umrigar in the insight section in the back of the book. “Bhima,“she says, “is real.” She was a servant in the author’s middle-class home when growing up in Mumbai. The Space Between Us explores the trials that modern-day India faces. It is a world in which the Caste system, though illegal, still exists, and in which thriving success clashes with frighteninglevels of poverty and lack of education. The Space Between Us is a powerful story about modern day India’sconflict with ancient tradition. Its characters are beautifully realized, and the story is rewarding and intriguing, making the book difficult to put down. Ms. Umrigar’s exploration of modern India made it easy to tremble at the injustices of the caste system and to identify with the characters and their struggles. Though a far different world from America, India’s growing pains are identifiable and accessible. The Space Between Us is widely available in both paperback and hardcover, and was a Pen/Beyond Margins Award finalist. Read an excerpt from this novel.

- Geoff Calver

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