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DOCUMENTARY SHORTS
Smile Pinki
Megan Mylan, 2008, 39 min
**Academy Award Winner**
Pinki is a five-year-old girl in rural India born desperately poor and with a cleft lip. The simple surgery that can cure her is a distant dream until she meets Pankaj, a social working traveling village to village gathering patients for a hospital that provides free surgery to thousands each year though the Smile Train program. Told in a vibrant trich observational style, this Oscar-winning real-world fairy tale folllows its wide-eyed protagonist from isolation to embrace.
"Documentary filmmaking at its best." --The Wall Street Journal
"Remarkable, incredibly moving" --The New York Times
2009 Academy Award Documentary Short
2010 Emmy-Award nomination, Best Documentary Editing
IDA Award Nominee
Premiere Silverdocs Festival
HBO Broadcast
Taller Than The Trees
Megan Mylan, (2016), 13 minutes
**New York Times Op-Doc**
Masami Hayata lives the life of a quintessential Japanese executive, husband and active father. But he reflects contemporary Japanese culture in another way, as well. Every day as Hayata struggles to care for his ageing mother, he is fulfilling expectations of family caregiving that are deeply rooted in a Confucian idea of filial piety, and oya koko, a devotion and respect for parents. Japan has the oldest population in the world, and with a high life expectancy and low birth rate, balancing these goals increasingly conflicts with the demands of modern life. Hayata’s struggle to give his mother grace and dignity in her last years is universally relevant.
New York Times Op-Docs
Tribeca Film Festival 2017
After My Garden Grows
Megan Mylan, 2014, 9 min
**Sundance Film Festival**
The story of Monika Barman, a teenager from rural India growing food to feed her family and the seeds of her own independence in a tiny rooftop garden. Monika is part of a program launched by the West Bengal government and the nonprofit Landesa that teaches basic farming methods to some 40,000 girls in the area. The goals are simple: reduce child marriage, keep the girls in school longer and help them eat better. And farming is the key to reaching those goals.
2014 Sundance Film Festival
Indian Theatrical Run, November 2014.
My Little Friends
Megan Mylan, 2013, 10 min
Seniors with dementia and young children come together at a custom-designed facility in Mt. Kisco, New York. The kids look right past the dementia, connecting instead with the people who have gotten lost underneath. Produced by the Living With Alzheimers Film Project.
In Search of the Bene Israel
Sadia Shepard, 2008, 38 min
The story of filmmaker Sadia Shepard’s quest to reconnect with her maternal grandmother’s Bene Israel community of Western India, In Search of the Bene Israel follows a group of 3500 Jews in and around Bombay which believes that it was shipwrecked in India 2000 years ago and is in the process of a community-wide migration to Israel. In this moving journey, we meet members of the community struggling with the difficult decision of whether to stay in India or join the world’s Jews in Israel. Through intimate interviews and observational footage, we come to know a family who takes care of a rural synagogue, a Jewish Indian filmmaker working in Bollywood, and a young couple on the eve of their marriage and departure for Israel.