They call her “the Afghan Joan of Arc” — 18-year-old Malalai, a national folk hero who fought alongside Ayub Khan and rallied the Pashtun defenders to victory over British troops at the Battle of Maiwand (near Kandahar) in 1880, during the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Many schools and hospitals in today’s Afghanistan are named for that brave girl, who was shot and killed in the fighting.
Starring: Malala Yousafzai.
Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements involving disturbing images and threats.
One hundred and thirty-two years later, in October 2012, her young namesake Malala Yousafzai had just boarded her school bus in Pakistan’s northwest Swat district when a gunman jumped inside, asked for her by name, and shot her in the forehead.
Oscar-winning documentary director Davis Guggenheim — who told “An Inconvenient Truth” about climate change with Al Gore in 2007 — tells an even more compelling truth here about the Taliban’s attempted assassination of a teenager who dared to champion girls' education.
Her first question, upon waking up in England from the surgery that saved her life: “Where’s my father?” Pakistani educator-activist Ziauddin Yousafzai is the “he” of this film’s title, as well as its co-hero. It was papa Ziauddin who chose her name and inscribed it on the parchment of his 300-year-old family tree — an all-male document on which no women had ever been listed. He would empower his daughter from the start, and vice versa: “We became dependent on each other, like one soul in two bodies.”
Director Guggenheim’s tribute to Malala and her family tells their tale in a truly affecting way, most wonderfully in the private moments that reveal her symbiotic relationship with a doting dad. It doesn’t neglect Khushal and Atal — the most adorable brothers in the world — and good times around their kitchen table in Birmingham. One minute, feisty Malala is slapping Atal’s hand away from a joystick or showing her father how to tweet. The next minute, she’s reflecting with a homesick tone on the verdant Swat valley, first conquered by Alexander the Great.
“For a time we lived in paradise,” she says — until Taliban militants took over in 2009 and turned it into hell, complete with bonfires of TV sets, music CDs, Western books and computers. Women were forbidden to leave their homes unaccompanied. A total ban on female education was decreed. Four hundred schools were torched — three in one night, including her father’s, in their own town. With her excellent command of English, Malala — using a pseudonym — began a bold BBC blog about girls’ life under the Taliban yoke. It was not unlike the journal kept by another precocious 14-year-old girl, Anne Frank.
It was very dangerous.
Mr. Guggenheim’s structure shuffles the chronology, alternating scenes of her physical recovery with her global activism. His camera follows Malala to Africa, with fascinating footage of a Massai girls’ classroom in Kenya and her visit with grieving families of the Boko Haram mass kidnappings in Nigeria. No polite photo ops for this kid. My favorite moment: She lectures hapless Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan about his bad luck and (unfulfilled) duty to secure the victims’ return.
Nor does our own Barack Obama escape accountability. At the White House, she confronts him about Pakistani civilian casualties from U.S. drone attacks.
“I am afraid of no one,” she says — just dogs.
The director, likewise unafraid, comes by his skills honestly: His father, Charles Guggenheim, is a multiple Oscar-winning documentarian (for “Robert Kennedy Remembered” in 1968, “The Johnstown Flood” in 1989, et al.). Son Davis’ “Waiting for Superman” (2010) was a brilliant dissection of the dropout factories and academic sinkholes of American public schools. The 87 compact minutes of “He Named Me Malala” include some beautifully impressionistic animated sequences that render — and soften — the subject’s childhood memories.
Highlight of the film — and its heroine’s life to date — is her 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, jointly awarded with Indian child-rights activist Kailash Satyarthi. At 17, Malala is its youngest-ever winner.
“Look,” says brother Khushal, “you have got this prize, but it does not mean you can become bossy.” In fact, she already is — using her celebrity for a fierce purpose, with amazing aplomb under intense media scrutiny. But she’s also a typical 10th-grade teenager with a sly sense of humor, into boys and cricket.
Asked who shot Malala, father Ziauddin answers: “It was not a person. It was an ideology.”
Some 60 million school-age girls worldwide do not attend school. In 70 countries they face violence for wanting or trying to do so. Education in general — Malala in particular — is an existential threat to such ideology. Do yourself and your own teens or tweens a big favor: Take them to this fine movie to meet Malala, who says education is not a gender-based privilege but a basic human right.
Post-Gazette film critic emeritus Barry Paris can be reached at parispg48@aol.com.
First Published: October 9, 2015, 4:00 a.m.
