A survey Smile Train commissioned in 2020 found alarmingly few Americans know what clefts are. And only 10% knew that when left untreated, as they often are in low- and middle-income countries, they can lead to serious, permanent health consequences, in addition to their cosmetic impact.
Years of testing have taught our team that few things raise awareness of our cause better than images of our patients before and after their cleft surgery. Yet these images don’t tell the whole story: while surgery produces dramatic results, it is just one step in a multi-disciplinary journey that can last for decades.
Documentary film stood out as the medium best suited for demonstrating the dramatic results of cleft surgery while reaching a mass audience with a powerful story about one of our nearly 2 million patients.
Specifically, we wanted our film to:
First, we hired One Production Place, a film crew with a history of beautiful, revealing, and award-winning health-focused documentaries.
We decided to film at a Smile Train partner hospital in the Philippines. Our original plan for the shoot quickly fell through, but luckily, we soon met Jessa and her brother Jary, who had an even more compelling story to tell.
Jary was abandoned by his parents when he was born with a cleft. Jessa, then a teenager, stepped up to take him in and is the only mother figure he has ever known. Over a decade later, he still lives with her, plus her partner and children, in a slum outside Manila. After Jary turned 13, they discovered that free cleft care was available, thanks to Smile Train, through one of Jessa’s cleft-affected friends.
Over the course of filming, the production team took pains to earn this family’s trust and respectfully chronicle their journey to care. Jessa’s unwavering commitment to her brother’s wellbeing shines throughout the film. And while Jary’s surgery was an unequivocal success, it was apparent that his treatment journey ahead was far from over. That truth inspired the film’s title, “Every Day After.”
Once shooting wrapped, we spent the next few months editing, animating, scoring, and audio mixing. We also hired documentary filmmaker Aubrey Aden-Buie to develop both a plan for submitting the film to festivals and a social and email presence that would appeal to three distinct audiences: documentary film aficionados, people with an interest in global healthcare, and the cleft community. Our messaging to focused on three themes: introducing the heroes of the film, spreading information about the cleft care journey, and calling out movies featuring villains with facial scars.
After weeks of waiting, we finally got into our first film festival, HollyShorts, which happened to be Oscar-qualifying. A few weeks later, we walked the red carpet at the TCL Chinese Theatre alongside some of the industry’s most renowned documentarians. After the debut, we enlisted the Filipina Smile Train Global Ambassador and former Miss Universe Catriona Gray to host a Q&A in a packed room. We used Jary’s story as a lens to educate the audience about clefts and our work, and thanks to Catriona’s celebrity and voice, our event was featured in DEADLINE. The next day, we found that we won Best Documentary and would be eligible for next year’s Oscars.
We set ambitious KPIs for this film from the outset and met or exceeded all of them. Specifically, we:
The film now has a permanent home at The Documentary Channel streaming service, but its journey has not ended. We are currently working on subtitles in ten languages and creating a classroom toolkit so that Jessa and Jary’s story will educate about clefts in schools around the world for years to come.
Ultimately, for us a nonprofit, that’s what this project is all about: educating about clefts. The media coverage and accolades are nice, but we think our truest successes are in what came after the screenings, the 50+ Q&A sessions where we got to answer questions about clefts and bring new supporters to our lifesaving cause.
