Pinki Sonkar Invited Wimbledon Final

Pinki’s Confident Wimbledon Performance. Pinki Sonkar Performs Coin Toss at Wimbledon
Game, Set, Smile! Pinki Brought Smiles To Centre Court at Wimbledon.

Pinki Sonkar Biography

Directed by Megan Mylan
Produced by Megan Mylan
Music by R. Prasanna
Cinematography Nick Doob
Jon Shenk
Editing by Purcell Carson
Release date(s) 2008
Running time 39 min.
Country USA
Language Bhojpuri/Hindi

Smile Pinki (2008) is a 39-minute documentary directed by Megan Mylan. The film shows the story of a poor girl in rural India whose life is transformed when she receives free surgery to correct her cleft lip. The documentary was made in Hindi and Bhojpuri, and won the 81st Academy Award for Best Documentary (Short Subject). Smile Pinki's win is an Oscar for more than 250 surgeons. Doctors believe the success of the film about a child with a cleft lip at the Academy Awards will create awareness about kids born with deformities and prenatal nutrition

Pinki Sonkar is a five-year-old girl who is living with a severe cleft lip in one of the poorest areas of India. Not allowed to attend school at her native village, Rampur Dahaba village in Mirzapur, near Varanasi, and ostracized because of her deformity, Pinki lives a life of quiet desperation as she waits and wonders if she will ever receive the cleft surgery. Her parents are unable to afford the surgery that she desperately needs. By chance, Pinki's parents meet a social worker one day who is traveling village to village, gathering patients for a hospital that provides free cleft lip surgery to thousands of poor children each year through The Smile Train program.

The surgery
Cleft lip and palate syndrome occurs in one in every 600 to 800 live births
Surgery can involve five procedures: one performed when the infant is three months old, another on the palate when the child is eight months old and then alveolar bonegrafting when the child is older. Therapy may also include sessions with an orthodontist and a speech therapist
In India alone, Smile Train has provided for free surgery to over a lakh children
Cost of surgery can amount to less than Rs 10,000 in a public hospital

The surgery was performed at G.S. Memorial Hospital, by plastic surgeon Dr. Subodh Kumar Singh, who along with Pinki attended the 81st Academy Award ceremony. She has been invited to toss up the coin in Wimbledon Final, 2013 in London.