True/False Films

Oscar-Nominated Shorts

In person: Megan Mylan, director of Smile Pinki

Shadowy figures from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have ordained these four films as the best shorts of the year. Shortly before the Khmer Rouge executed 17,000 prisoners, they asked a teenager named Nhem En to photograph them. Some 30 years later, he and three survivors tell their story in The Conscience of Nhem Em (dir. Steven Okazaki, 34 min.). A visiting plastic surgeon helps a young social outcast with a cleft lip in Smile Pinki (dir. Megan Mylan, 39 min.). Only a few men were with Martin Luther King Jr., in the hours leading up to his tragic death, and we meet one of them in the powerful The Witness: From the Balcony of Room 306 (dir. Margaret Hyde & Adam Pertofsky, 34 min.) featuring recently uncovered footage. In The Final Inch (dir. Irene Brodsky Taylor, 32 min.) we journey to the poorest parts of India, where activists are waging final battle to eradicate polio in the world.