He Named Me Malala

In 2012 in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, the Taliban shot a 15-year-old Muslim girl in the head over her support for girls’ education. He Named Me Malala is a documentary that recounts the life of that now-famous girl, Malala Yousafzai. Malala survived the attempted execution after a long time in the hospital. The film’s footage of her rehabilitation is moving when you consider her rhetorical power today. At that point, she couldn’t catch a ball. She went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 for her continuing work promoting girls’ education around the world.

Most of the documentary takes place in England, where Malala currently lives due to ongoing death threats from the Taliban in Pakistan. The documentary covers familiar ground of her story but uses lovely pastel animation to recount her life in Pakistan. It also gives a look into her home life now, where she struggles to keep up with the grades of the other girls at her British school. She has a wall with English vocabulary taped to it, including the phrase “cat burglar,” which makes her laugh. Malala never has a grumpy teenager moment.

The scenes in her home show a not very conservative Muslim family. Her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, makes breakfast for the children, and Malala discusses having a boyfriend. Ziauddin recounts writing Malala’s name on their 300-year-old family tree when she was born, and says she was the first woman on the tree.

“Islam teaches humanity, forgiveness,” Malala insists when asked about Islamic extremists. When the filmmaker asks her father if he knows who shot Malala, Ziauddin responds, “It is not a person. It is an ideology.” The Taliban, he said, “were not about faith, they were about power. … They are the enemies of Islam.” The Yousafzai family is presented as a paragon of moderate Islam: They pray at a mosque, and the women wear headscarves; but they also promote equality of the sexes, surf the internet, and watch cricket.

I recommend The New York Times’ 2009 documentary on Malala, available for free on its website, to see more of her life in Pakistan, and of life under militant Islam. That documentary, recorded before the shooting, gives more of a picture of what women and girls like Malala are living through on a daily basis in these countries. He Named Me Malala, which didn’t even send a film crew to Pakistan, borrows shots from the Times documentary.

Malala director Davis Guggenheim has a string of documentary hits that include Waiting for “Superman” and An Inconvenient Truth. He obviously knows his craft, but his documentaries can be preachy. This is a failing of Malala, whose compelling story doesn’t need a spelled-out message.

The film closes with the screen going black and text appearing: “When you educate a girl, it changes her world. It changes our world.” Thank you for explaining, Mr. Guggenheim.

Setting aside the film’s hagiographical moments, it’s worth seeing the girlishness as well as the uncanny self-possession of this 18-year-old. Malala has become an icon of the victims of Islamic extremism. The film shows her emotional meeting with parents of schoolgirls whom Boko Haram kidnapped. Her presence drew dozens of news cameras to the matter. Guggenheim could have told the story of this remarkable girl better.