Davis Guggenheim: “He Named Me Malala” | Talks at Google

It was, he recalls, remarkably mundane. “He Named Me Malala” celebrates but one moving story, one fearless voice, and invites us to share our own.

He Named Me Malala, the new documentary from Fox Searchlight Pictures and Academy Award-winning director Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth, Waiting for Superman), opens in theaters across the US and Canada on Friday, October 9. “But they also have tough conversations just like my family does”, said Guggenheim. How this father and this girl did something so extraordinary? But upon meeting the teenager, they determined it would be impossible to cast and decided to make the movie a documentary. Universal education became her “cause” and made her, for all intents and purposes in the 21st century, a symbol of civilization in a world that is being increasingly overrun by medieval fundamentalism and the astonishing growth of ignorance everywhere.

The parents of Nobel prize-winner Malala Yousafzai have spoken of the attack on their daughter and called it “true cowardice” to not believe in women’s freedom.

“Because a few stories are very hard to tell”, he said.

The documentary about her life is due to be shown at the launch of the Into Film Festival in Birmingham. She’s bossy when she lords it over her two younger brothers, and she’s girlish when she refuses to admit that her fascination with certain handsome cricket players might have something to do with how hunky they are.The film is meant to be inspirational, so there isn’t much to moderate the adoring portrait. In fact, she already is – using her celebrity for a fierce goal, with incredible aplomb under intense media scrutiny. At least I was the mother of a girl of whom I was proud. She rallied the Afghan troops to defeat the British.

But, she added, she could not “stop a girl like her from talking or speaking up”. In England, she is at best a mediocre student (it’s unclear if this has to do with language) and something of a social outcast. These are stories told with lovely animation and narrated by Malala and her father. But Malala thinks otherwise. Given to her by her father, a passionate educator who taught Malala to be independent and outspoken, Guggenheim wonders if the name predicted her fate, or if Malala chose her own path.

He said: “Why should we paralyse half of our population?” But the very same person doesn’t intend to mention about her issues. I imagined a Japanese girl in Tokyo. Guggenheim has mostly wasted a chance to tease out its deeper threads, but then maybe, at the level of folk hero, all you ever really are is a name.

Her answer points to gender inequality and lack of opportunities for women in developing countries.

“She worries about her physics test. Sometimes she doesn’t do well”. It is your job to get them released.’… Malala is still a teenager, after all, as her older and younger brother remind us.

He also stressed that, an investment in realizing the power of adolescent girls upholds their right today and promises a more equitable and prosperous future, one in which half of humanity is an equal partner in solving the problems of climate change, political conflict, economic growth, disease prevention and global sustainability. She chooses to speak out. Her time is split between being a teenage girl and meeting with world leaders to help put and keep girls all over the world in school.

“Her family went through a lot”.