Oscar-Winning HP Alum to Screen New Film
Oscar-winning filmmaker Megan Mylan, a Highland Park High School graduate, will return to Dallas next week for multiple screenings of her latest documentary, Simple as Water.
The film, which debuted on HBO in 2021, follows four families of Syrian migrants through separation and displacement due to military conflict in their homeland. It was filmed over five years in five different countries.
The film will screen for free at 6:30 p.m. Monday at SMU’s Caruth Hall, and again at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Violet Crown theater in the West Village. The second screening will benefit earthquake relief in Turkey and Syria.
Simple as Water also will screen on Thursday at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. All screenings are open to the public and will include a Q&A afterward with Mylan and two of the film’s subjects — siblings Omar and Abed Sabha — who were born in Aleppo but have resettled together in Houston.
Mylan specializes in films with a humanistic international focus. She won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject in 2008 for Smile Pinki, about two children in rural India seeking surgery for cleft lips.
She also co-directed Lost Boys of Sudan, the acclaimed 2003 film about Sudanese refugees fleeing their war-torn homeland for a better life in the United States.
After graduating from Highland Park in the late 1980s, Mylan earned degrees from Georgetown University and the University of California at Berkeley, and has won numerous awards for her film and television projects.
