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| Director Davis Guggenheim, Malala Yousafzai, and Ziauddinuddin Yousafzai in Birmingham, England. Caroline Furneaux / Twentieth Century Fox Film |
“The goal,” Guggenheim adds, “is to try to get millions of kids to see the movie… We have partners [he credits Participant Media, the Malala Fund, and Image Nation, among others] who are not just interested in making a movie, but a movement. And I’ve had that experience on An Inconvenient Truth… Not only is it a great experience, but you can change people’s minds. 66 Million girls are out of schools, 66 million girls are like Malala [was], and so that’s her mission on this Earth.”
Malala didn’t attend the Festival herself, but she made a
surprise appearance via Skype with her father Ziauddin for a Q&A, and her
enthusiasm for the project echoes Guggenheim’s own. Malala herself said she
hopes He Named Me Malala lives not as
a movie, but as a movement that engages students and creates opportunities for
education. The similarity between the answers that Guggenheim and Yousafzai
offer on two different occasions works on several levels, including smart PR
strategy, but it overall shows how He
Named Me Malala is an earnest effort to use documentary for art and
activism alike.
The artistry of He
Named Me Malala is chiefly evident in Guggenheim’s inspired choice to tell
the backstory of Malala’s namesake in breathtaking animated sequences. The film
explains in these animated scenes that Ziauddin named his daughter after
Malalai of Maiwand, a folk hero who inspired Afghan troops to fight the British
before she was killed for her efforts, as he was inspired by her spirit and
hoped to inject the same life into his daughter. The film imagines Malalai’s story
in lyrical, impressionist vignettes that evokes a strong spirit of resilience
that breathes into Malala’s story. “Imagine that,” Guggenheim says while
approaching the animated story of Malala’s namesake, “Malala was named after a
girl who was killed for speaking out, and then she was shot for speaking out.”
It’s an amazing story that one couldn’t pull of convincingly in a script.
“But how do you tell that story? I didn’t have cameras at
the battle of Maiwan,” Guggenheim says with a laugh, “so the idea was that
instead of telling it from my point of view, I was telling it from her
[Malala’s] point of view: how would a Pakistani girl imagine that battle, and
so that’s how these precious, lyrical hand-drawn animations came to be.”
Guggenheim goes on to say that the animation affords
enormous freedom while telling a story like that of Malala and her family. The
art form is in a new turn, which affords filmmakers the ability to create
emotional or subjective truths where raw verité footage is unavailable (or
inappropriate). “I think what’s exciting about how documentaries have changed,”
the director says, “is that for a long they were seen as just journalism—and in
many cases they are, and their roots are that—and certainly documentaries need
to be truthful and accurate, but I feel that there are great innovators who’ve
changed that. Michael Moore, Errol Morris, among many. And now documentaries
can be great stories.”
“Sometimes animating a sequence is more effective than
getting a ‘real’ story across in other ways,” Guggenheim argues. The lyrical
animation gives a more hopeful image and hue to the war and the violence. This
effectiveness lets the animated tale ring true with Malala’s spirit in the face
of adversity and the film’s own mandate to inspire positive change. “You think
about how we get our news about this part of the world, like images of terrible
atrocities in Syria: images that come from this part of the world are confusing
or scary, and as a viewer, you turn the page,” the director adds. “And I still
do that. ‘It’s too much.’ Because it’s impossible to solve. The truth is that
story from that part of the world is not that [the recycled media images of
terror and misery]. That’s a narrow, negative sliver and, unfortunately,
journalists from the west perpetuate that. Malala’s story is very different
from that, so that I needed to find a different language to tell her story.”
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| Malala Yousafzai and director Davis Guggenheim in Birmingham, England. Caroline Furneaux. / Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. |
Malala’s own language appears in the film through interviews
and observational footage as Guggenheim spends time her Malala and her family,
and travels with her to key episodes of her inspiring journey, such as her trip
to the Syrian border, her famous speech at the UN, and her receipt of the Noble
Peace Prize. Viewers might be taken aback by Malala’s candid bashfulness and
plainness. She’s modest and she doesn’t like talking about herself, and like
many girls her age, she happily Googles sexy sports stars, which inspires some
teasing from her brothers.
One pivotal scene late in the film sees Malala hesitate.
It’s the one moment where she shows discomfort with the interview process.
Guggenheim asks Malala why she doesn’t like talking about her suffering (after
all, she was shot in the head) and Malala draws back. “I would say that’s a big
moment in the movie,” Guggenheim agrees. “And I wouldn’t say that she wasn’t
open… She just doesn’t know how to talk about her suffering, but also,
genuinely, she feels that there are millions of girls who are suffering, so how
dare she complain?”
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| Malala Yousafzai at the Kisaruni Girls School in Massai Mara, Kenya. Fox Searchlight Pictures |
The director channels Malala’s own spirited playfulness as
he puts the idea of “suffering” into perspective, with First World problems
like spicy aioli taken as suffering despite far graver suffering worldwide.
“She feels real gratitude,” Guggenheim adds, “which I don’t quite understand.
She lives without bitterness.” It’s true, as Malala’s overall lack of anger in
the film is both surprising and inspiring. The director adds that the tragedy
that made headlines and brought Malala’s story to the forefront was a pivotal
moment for the family. “We found a togetherness,” he recalls Ziauddin saying,
and admits that the experience of working with Malala, Ziauddin, and their
family was one of the best of his life.
Guggenheim credits the love and trust in the Yousafzai home
with playing a key role in structuring the film. “I felt like the story should
build towards that choice where Malala goes to the TV station and decides to
speak out and call out the Taliban. To do it that way, I had to reverse
engineer it and intercut her present day story first with her past story and
that was very challenging—you’ll see that the film seesaws between these two
different realities.” These realities—past, present, fact, fiction, drama, and
animation—weave Malala’s story into a larger collective narrative about choices
and action.
“I know at the heart of the story was a choice to speak
out,” says the director. “Would I run away or protect my family, or would I do
what they [Malala and her peers] did and speak out?” By weighing the risks of
duty and loyalty, the film builds on the lore of Malala’s name to arouse future
activism.
At the end of the day, though, and at the end of the film,
Malala is still a young girl. While He
Named Me Malala is respectful to Malala, it keeps her modest and grounded. “It’s
dangerous to look at these people like they’re superheroes,” Guggenheim argues,
“like they’re too brilliant, like someone sprinkled them with magic dust to
make them superhuman. Malala was an ordinary girl. She became more
extraordinary by making that choice, so you can see that all of us have the
potential to be extraordinary with the choices we make.”
It opens in theatres everywhere October 9 from
Fox Searchlight Pictures.
(Read the review of He Named Me Malala at POV.)
(Read the review of He Named Me Malala at POV.)
He Named Me Malala had its International Premiere at the 2015
Toronto International Film Festival.
Please visit www.tiff.net for more
information on this year’s festival.
More coverage on this year’s festival can be found here.
