He Named Me Malala: Story of teen Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai
Still a teenager, she has already won the Nobel Prize for Peace, thus bringing down the average age of recipients of that honour which was over 60 till she was chosen. She also has a best-selling memoir that retells her already eventful and influential life story.
She has appeared on multiple magazine covers and with royalty, Presidents and Prime Ministers. It’s therefore appropriate that she is now the subject of a documentary feature directed by an Oscar-winning filmmaker who has previously turned his lens upon the likes of former American Vice-President Al Gore and the Irish supergroup U2.
She is 18-year-old Malala Yousafzai, and the biopic, He Named Me Malala, directed by Davis Guggenheim, who also helmed An Inconvenient Truth, will have its international premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival or TIFF today. Fittingly enough, since her activism has been centred around education, that screening will be at a university auditorium.
But the documentary isn’t just about a young girl from Pakistan’s Swat Valley, who was shot by the Taliban for simply seeking to study, and after treatment in England emerged as a champion of education for girls. It’s also about a teenager who giggles while scrolling through images of Brad Pitt, Roger Federer or Shane Watson online.
TIFF’s Artistic Director Cameron Bailey said, “My first instinct in making this movie was that it is very much about a family, about a father’s love and about a girl who feels empowered to do amazing things. It would be easy to tell this story in a sensationalistic way. But that’s not what inspires me.”
As she interacts with her parents and brothers at breakfast, that becomes evident, as a sibling quips, “She’s the naughtiest girl on Earth.”