“He Named Me Malala”: An inside look at Davis Guggenheim’s new film
by Kelli Hill
It’s been almost three years since the world came to know Malala Yousafzai. On Oct. 9, 2012, the 15-year-old Pakistani girl was shot in the head by Taliban men for standing up for her right to go to school.
After months in a hospital bed, Malala picked up right where she left off in her fight to give every girl the chance to get an education. She has become an activist and symbol for girls’ and women’s rights around the world. In December 2014, she became the youngest person ever to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Oscar-winning documentary director Davis Guggenheim spent 18 months with Malala and her family, capturing her travels to schools across the world as well as her quite normal family life in Birmingham, England. Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric sat down with Guggenheim to talk about his new film, “He Named Me Malala,” which will be released tomorrow.
“I realized that there was this very complex relationship between her and her father,” says Guggenheim about setting out to make the film, adding, “I wanted to unpack the mystery between this man and this girl.”
While the film follows the father-daughter relationship throughout, the rest of the family – including Malala’s mother, Tor Pekai — give a glimpse of another side of the young activist.
“Anyone who knows them knows that she gets her passion and sense of mission from her father, Ziauddin, but she gets her moral strength and her spiritual power from her mother. When you go into her house, you figure out right away who’s in charge. And Tor Pekai, her mother, is in charge,” says Guggenheim. He also says Malala’s brothers were quick to tell him that their famous sister is “the naughtiest girl in the world.”
By the end of the film, Guggenheim really wants viewers — including his two daughters — to realize that Malala is just an “ordinary girl in a very small town, and she became extraordinary because she made a really tough choice: to risk her life for what she believed.”
Guggenheim says, “There are girls everywhere who have that feeling of ‘if Malala can do it, I can do it.’”
