Girl uninterrupted
He Named Me Malala Inspiring doc shines a light on the power of one voice.
Welcome to the life of teenage activist Malala Yousafzai. The extraordinary subject of director Davis Guggenheim’s doc He Named Me Malala, she made headlines in October 2012 when, aged 15, she was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman while campaigning for girl’s education. Overcoming serious injuries, she then moved from Pakistan’s Swat Valley to Birmingham, eventually winning the Nobel Youth Peace Prize for her passionate activism, and has since worked with her father Ziauddin to become a leading advocate for the cause.
“Malala’s is an incredible story of someone who risked her life to speak out for what is right,” says Guggenheim, speaking to Agenda at a top-secret North London location with more security guards than a Salman Rushdie book signing. Guggenheim, best known for Oscar-winning climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth, had followed her story from the beginning. “I read her anonymous blog for the BBC when the Taliban were punishing girls for going to school, and then I saw about the shooting – like everyone else, I was horrified,” he says. “But I soon realised this film is not just the story of a heroic girl, but of a father and daughter.” Ziauddin ran a chain of schools in the region and spoke out against the regime while others were being killed. “That is raw courage that I’ve never seen in my life,” reflects Guggenheim. “Theirs is a deep and complicated bond.”
The director spent 18 months at home with the Yousafzais, capturing the domestic life of the family alongside their globe-trotting work. The film shows Malala arm-wrestling her impish little brothers and giggling over her father’s hapless attempts to get to grips with Twitter. Guggenheim was captivated by the then 17-year-old. “She’s very poised but she has this almost otherworldly aura and power about her,” he marvels, but his film also reminds us she’s a teenager as well as a world famous humanitarian. In one scene, she’s addressing the U.N. with an eloquence that would put Churchill to shame, in another she’s grappling with the rigours of GCSE Physics and then swooning over a picture of tennis star Roger Federer.
It’s difficult not to draw parallels with levels of activism in the West. “I’m frustrated that in the mostly safe United States, people don’t speak out against injustices,” laments the director. “And here you are in the Swat Valley where they’re literally blowing up schools, and these people saw the value in their voice. I believe in the power of storytelling. An Inconvenient Truth helped change the conversation about climate change and I have those kind of hopes for this documentary. It’s more than just a movie, it’s a movement.” CWS ETA | 6 November He Named Me Malala opens later this year.
‘Malala risked her life to speak out for what is right’