Megan Mylan is the American born director of the short documentary film “Smile Pinki” about an 8 year old girl in India, born with a cleft lip, who received corrective surgery from Dr. Subodh Singh from Smile Train, the world’s leading cleft charity.
This post is not about the absolutely wonderful work that Smile Train does, it is about communications, public speaking and messaging, and what every winner of every Oscar going forward can learn from Ms. Mylan about messaging.
Ironically, Megan won the Oscar for Best Short, Documentary, and her speech matched it perfectly — brief, easy to understand, and on message. The fact that the speech was on message is even more important to note as a number of acceptance speeches I won’t mention (including the one read off of a torn piece of paper) had no message at all.
Without further ado, Ms. Mylan’s acceptance speech (text) from last evening:
“Wow! Oh, to be in a room with all this talent. Lucky me, and to tell stories for a living, lucky me. And to have a family and friends who love me and my movies totally unconditionally.
Documentary, like all filmmaking, is a complete team sport, and I’d like to thank my editor Purcell Carson, cinematographers Nick Doob and Jon Shenk, field producer Nandini Rajwade and from HBO Sheila Nevins and Lisa Heller.
The same magic that happens in our film happens every day for children with clefts all around the world because of a terrific organization called the Smile Train.
But most importantly for documentary filmmakers it’s our subjects. The incredible Dr. Subodh and his team, Ghutaru Chauhan and our heroine Pinki Kumari. Thank you, thank you, thank you for letting me tell your inspiring story.
What a gift. Thank you all so much.”
She was able to do accomplish something in her acceptance speech that many are able to achieve in film but too few are able to accomplish when accepting awards, such as the Oscars — touch viewers, leave an imprint AND change thousands of lives.
Simply put, to me, her performance was the highlight of the evening. Congratulations Megan!
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