Malala Yousafzai’s life story is intimately familiar to the world—and even to those who had only heard of her for the first time in October 2012, when she was shot and nearly killed by the Taliban in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, for daring to publicly campaign for girls’ education. Since then, and particularly after she was declared joint winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, her almost-stilled voice has received further amplification, and her cause has been propelled into a higher orbit. She is today a celebrated persona on the international lecture circuit for children’s education, to the point of nearly being reduced to a rent-a-quote activist.
What this documentary by Davis Guggenheim (who also directed An Inconvenient Truth) does—and does well—therefore, is to bring out the endearing child in the child activist without taking any attention away from the larger cause that she represents. Alongside chilling video footage from the day of the Taliban attack on her (and other attacks on girls’ schools and dissenters in the Swat Valley), we are provided an up-close and intimate portrayal of the giggly globe-trotting girl, who still has to do her school homework.
There’s one particular scene that I found touchingly endearing. Malala is about to address a gathering in Birmingham. She’s walking down a corridor in a building; there are celebrities and television cameras all around. It’s a solemn official event, but the solemnity of the occasion is briefly compromised when a frisky and friendly dog that has broken free of its leash runs towards her. Malala, who is evidently unafraid of the Taliban but scared stiff of canines, lets out a yelp and scampers back down the corridor. But rather than diminish her dignity, the scene reminds us that she is, after all, only a child—a courageous child, yes, but a child nonetheless—on whom international celebrity status was thrust upon because of the Taliban’s bigotry.
Malala may owe her name (which was inspired by a brave Pashto girl whose courage propelled tribal warriors to take on imperialist armies) to her visionary father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, who is himself a tireless campaigner for children’s (and particularly girls’) education and against Taliban fundamentalism. But as she herself says, he didn’t “make” her Malala—or propel her into danger. She did it of her own volition, and having survived the Taliban’s guns, is taking her message to newer displaced communities, from Palestinians to Syrian refugees to a Nigeria overrun by Boko Haram madness.
Fusing the personal with the political with great dexterity, Guggenheim gives us a biopic that educates, enriches and amuses in equal measure.
