Many people read about superheroes that wear capes and have supernatural powers but like the common saying goes, ‘not all heroes wear capes.’
Malala Yousafzai, a noble and courageous young woman, is a strong activist in children’s education and she does not wear a cape.
Malala, a Pakistani teenager who suffered gunshot wounds from the Taliban, is now the youngest individual to ever win a Nobel Peace Prize for her strength and encouragement in equality for education.
Malala and her family stars in her own documentary, “He Named Me Malala,” about her life before and after the shooting that changed her forever. The heartfelt, childhood stories Malala and her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, bring up in the film are shown through exquisite, acrylic paintings that give the viewers a visual on the Yousafzai’s emotional past. They bring up the fact that Ziauddin is a political speaker which caused him and his family to receive threats from the Taliban when Malala was only a few years old. Ziauddin holds back tears as he looks back at those sorrowful moments.
The eighteen-year-old teen shifts uncomfortably as she begins talking about the shooting and what came after. Malala was shot on the left side of her forehead. Many surgeries later, she lost all feeling in the left side of her face. The way Malala describes the horrific event puts the audience in an emotional roller coaster, pushing them to tears and giving them goose bumps. Throughout the countless surgeries and the recovery time that came after, she continued to stay strong and not let the experience get to her. She said that even through recovery she was not mad.
She does not let the near death experience get to her. She lives a normal life with her parents and two younger brothers. One would say she has a typical brother-sister relationship with her siblings; she fights with her brothers “out of love.” When the subject of boys came, Malala blushed as she talked about her celebrity crushes: David Beckham, Brad Pitt, and a few cricket players from the Pakistan team.
Malala Yousafzai continues to inspire children and young women all over the world to fight for the right of education for all. Malala has even created an all-girls school for Syrian refugees to celebrate her eighteenth birthday.
“He Named Me Malala” is a powerful and descriptive documentary about a young women’s traumatic experience that inspired her to fight for education for all in