The trailer for Malala’s new documentary is here, and it’s giving us chills
The last time youngest ever Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai appeared on The Daily Show, in 2013, she left host Jon Stewart completely speechless, when applying her pacifist wisdom to the Taliban members who attempted to assassinate her as a 14-year-old boarding a school bus.
Last night, when she appeared again on The Daily Show, Malala impressed Stewart with something else: A clip from a new documentary based on her life. The trailer for the movie, He Named Me Malala, directed by An Inconvenient Truth‘s Davis Guggenheim, is both a celebration and an inside look at the teenager who’s singlehandedly changing the world for the better.
Malala (she’s better known, Madonna-like, simply by her first name), has become known for her activism for the rights of children, and particularly girls, to an education. Her advocacy work and perseverance in her native Pakistan, in which an oppressive regime actively, often violently, discourages women from going to school, has inspired people around the world.
“There’s a moment when you have to choose whether to be silent or to stand up,” Malala says in the film’s trailer. Clearly, she chose to stand up. The trailer hints that the movie will show a side of Malala that isn’t always visible during her advocacy work: The things that make her a normal teenager who loves to hang out and play cards with her friends. (“She’s a little bit naughty. Little bit. That much,” says her youngest brother teasingly, opening his fingers just a pinch.)
Malala also gives her parents credit for nurturing her sense of equality, and for helping her with her activism work. “Who would you have been if you were just an ordinary girl from the Swat Valley [in Pakistan]?” a narrator asks. “I’m still an ordinary girl,” Malala replies in the trailer. “But if I had an ordinary father and an ordinary mother, I would have two children by now.”
And most touchingly of all, we learn about the origins of Malala’s name. “You named her after a woman who spoke out and was killed,” the narrator says to her father. “It’s almost as if you were setting her up to be different.”
“You’re right,” her father said, smiling, to the camera.
“My father only gave me the name Malala,” she responds. “He didn’t make me Malala. I chose this life and now I must continue it.”
We can’t wait to see this movie about such a strong, incredible person. But until it opens, on October 2, we have this trailer to look at. Take a peek.
We need to talk about this: 8 of Malala’s shooting suspects are now free
Malala Yousafzai accepted her Nobel Peace Prize and was as inspiring as we dreamed she’d be
[Image courtesy of Fox Searchlight]
