The first words we hear on this portrait of the youngest-ever Nobel Peace Prize winner are from director Davis Guggenheim, asking Malala Yousafzai to tell her incredible story.
When it comes to the person entrusted to make a documentary as important – and sure to be scrutinised – as this, the American director's credentials are solid. He made Waiting for Superman in 2010, about the failings of the American public school system, and before that, former US vice president Al Gore's environmental cautionary tale, 2006's An Inconvenient Truth.
The resulting snapshot of the 18-year-old Pakistani, who was famously shot in the head by the Taliban in a 2011 assassination attempt after defiantly continuing to attend school against their wishes, is told almost entirely from her perspective.
It is absent of grandstanding, moral judgement or analysis of religious extremism.
Instead, the viewer gets the kind of insight into the schoolgirl – who was awarded the peace prize last year – that one does not get from watching and reading the news
Those include peeks at her physiotherapy sessions, where she re-learnt how to bounce and catch a ball. We see Malala at school in England, where she worries about fitting in. We watch as she tries to balance her time between her own education and spending time away to help others, and witness the pressure this puts on her.
She wonders about whether to go to Africa in the aftermath of the Boko Haram kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls: “I’m still a teenager, what should I do? How can I help?” Her ability to highlight an issue becomes clear when she does go and the world’s press later descends on Kenya and Nigeria in July last year.
The strongest parts of the film, however, are the quiet, personal moments of her life at home.
Those include the difficulties that Malala’s mother, Toor Pekai, has in transitioning from life in Swat Valley to Birmingham, England. The whole family misses their friends in Pakistan, but it’s Toor who seems to carry the greatest burden. Remarkably, however, she bears no grudges against the individuals who shot her daughter. Her sentiment of forgiveness is one carried throughout the tone of the film.
The mantra is: “It’s not a person who shot Malala, it’s an ideology.”
A lot of light relief arrives in the shape of Malala’s sibling rivalry with her two younger brothers, Khushal and Atal. Used to seeing Malala at home, they almost bemused by the fame of someone they see as “the naughtiest person in the world”.
The biggest relationship in the film is the one between Malala and her father, Ziauddin, the “he” of the title.
The school administrator has been the greatest influence on Malala's life and political views: when the Taliban entered Swat, he was part of the opposition and he was the one encouraging her to write the BBC blog. The scenes between them are touching and affecting and He Named Me Malala is as much his story as it is hers. In one particularly powerful moment, Ziauddin insists on Malala being the first woman's name to be added to a family tree dating back 300 years.
The film opens with an animation sequence that explains Malala’s powerful namesake, reenacting the battle of Maiwand, when Pashtun fighters fought against the British in 1880.
The Afghani troops were rallied by a woman named Malala, who climbed to the top of the mountain and declared: “It’s better to live like a lion for one day than as a slave for 100 years.”
Animation is a device documentary filmmakers are increasingly turning to when actual footage doesn't exist, and one Guggenheim used in his previous film Waiting for Superman.
Guggenheim takes his time introducing us to Malala and her family, first revealing her personality, looking at her history, including 2007-era Swat Valley and the rise of Mullah Fazlullah, the so called “Radio Mullah” who became the de facto authority in the region.
But this is not a film about the Taliban. It’s about how a family can rise above oppression with humility. It’s telling that the documentary concentrates on 2013, the year that she was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize but did not win, rather than a year later when, at 17, she did.
In this way the documentary reminds us that the triumph of Malala does not come from her accolades, but from her humanity and desire to improve the lot of schoolgirls around the globe.
The importance of education
• Research shows that a girl who gets a single extra year of education can make 20 per cent more money as an adult. Educated girls are likely to have smaller families, have healthier children and have the skills to start businesses, to get jobs and contribute more fully to their communities.
• More than 60 million school-age girls around the world are not attending classes. Yet the average length of a girl’s education in the world’s poorest countries is just three years. In Pakistan, it’s not much better, at an average of only 4.7 years. About 70 countries worldwide, girls are threatened with violence just for wanting to go to school. Malala Yousafzai and her father co-founded the Malala Fund, an organisation that focuses on empowering girls through quality secondary education.
The Malala Fund has three aims:
• First, it is committed to ensuring that girls everywhere have access to the full 12 years of education.
• Second, it invests in education projects that provide quality, safe schooling for girls, especially those who would otherwise have no access to high school.
• Third, it works with global leaders, governments and private organisations to increase funding commitments so that every child’s right to education can be fulfilled.
• More information at www.malala.org
He Named Me Malala premieres at the Telluride Film Festival on September 6, opens in US cinemas on October 2 and has its European premiere at the London Film Festival, from October 7 to 18. It will open in UAE cinemas on November 5.
artslife@thenational.ae
