Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head by the Taliban for refusing to stay home from school. She’s now an international folk hero, education crusader and Nobel laureate. In this vivacious documentary, director Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) explains her fortitude as mostly nurture, via her teacher father who named her after the girl warrior who lead the Pashtun to victory over the British in 1880.
The director’s hand is heavy at times, (overbearing score, over-eager animation) but also deft, as he explores the horror, the celebrity, and the crusade she now fronts – all intercut with a most charming home life.
There’s the brother who questions her public sainthood: “At home she is so violent, she slaps me”, he says, only half joking. We see her proud father, welling-up backstage, as she charms Jon Stewart and the world via The Daily Show. Her glum mother, who had no education, haunts the film, as if to prove the point. We also meet Malala the teenager, giggling while quizzed about ‘boys’, before begrudgingly admitting a crush on Australian cricketer Shane Watson.
Yes, of course it’s hagiography; after all Malala is part Joan of Arc, part Princess Diana holding the hand of an AIDS patient. Her story is compelling and irresistible, perhaps more so for us in the West where it can be argued that it helps justify the brutal suppression of Islamic evildoers and the collateral damage required to prosecute them. Malala: poster girl for drone strikes?
These complexities aren’t tackled but they are touched on, as we briefly hear from Pakistanis who see her as a pawn rather than a saint. Malala mostly avoids the politics, but in a rare moment allows, “of course I talked to him [Obama] about drone strikes”, but the film leaves it at that.
‘He Named Me Malala’ Movie Times
We also suggest you try: 5 Broken Cameras, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, I Am A Girl
