A review of the 2015 documentary “He Named Me Malala”
‘Me’ is of course Malala Yousafai, the inspirational Pakistani girl who aged 15 was the subject of an assassination attempt by the Taliban. ‘He’ is her father Ziauddin who, in his own way, is a remarkable individual and who – contrary to what she states in this moving film – gave her much more than the name of a Pashtun heroine from history.
This cinematic work was inspired by the biography “I Am Malala” which I have read [for my review click here], but acclaimed American documentary maker Davis Guggenheim (“An Inconvenient Truth”) tells the story of Malala’s life before and after the shooting through a mixture of hand-drawn animation, archive footage, and filming over a year and a half at her English home in Birmingham and on visits to Nigeria and Jordan.
The film demonstrates the passion, bravery, humility, intelligence and fluency of this young woman who at just 17 became the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate as production was concluding. Her story has just begun …