He Named Me Malala (PG). Director: Davis Guggenheim. Starring: Malala Yousafzai, Ziauddin Yousafzai. 88 minutes
Malala Yousafzai is a worthy subject. A Pakistani activist for female education and the youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate (in 2014 at the age of 17), her international prominence was cemented in October 2012 when she was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman. She survived, and has since continued advocating and working for women's education around the world, including this year opening a school for 14 to 18-year-old refugee girls in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon, near the Syrian border. Her memoir I Am Malala, co-written with British journalist Christina Lamb, provides the basis for this documentary.
In relating Malala's early and present life, and her achievements as an advocate on the public stage both before and after the shooting, documentarian Guggenheim weaves together a number of disparate elements. Most engaging is a series of mythic, animated vignettes that tie her experiences in the Swat Valley in northwest Pakistan to those of the 19th century Pakistani folk hero Malalai of Maiwand, after whom she was named. There are also original interviews, and fly-on-the-wall footage of Malala's home and school life in her adopted home of England, and advocacy trips to Ethiopia and Nigeria.
The 'he' of the title is Malala's father Ziauddin, who is the secondary hero of Guggenheim's account of Malala's life. We are told, rather touchingly, how he overcame a stutter in order to emulate his preacher father. Later, he developed a passion for teaching, opening a school in the Swat Valley and fostering in Malala, his only daughter and eldest child, a passion for learning, as well as a fierce individual agency. A stutter is hardly an equivalent hardship to the experiences of being a young woman at odds with the Taliban, but Ziauddin's back story helps to illuminate the values in whose light Malala was nurtured.
Sadly the film is not more than the sum of its parts. Guggenheim tends to opt for glib hagiography over insightful storytelling. He introduces us to Kainat Riaz and Shazia Ramzan, the two other girls who were wounded during the attempt on Malala's life, but does not invite their recollections of the event. We have bitsy encounters with Malala's cheeky younger brothers, but no great insights into her family life. The film is clearly well-intentioned, but does a disservice to Malala and her story, reducing it to something with the depth and cogency of an unedited Wikipedia screed — tantalising, but unsatisfying.
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