He Named Me Malala

He Named Me Malala (2015) is a documentary you can watch online on iFILM. Davis Guggenheim, who made An Inconvenient Truth, builds a portrait of Malala Yousafzai — the girl from Pakistan's Swat Valley whom a gunman shot on her school bus for demanding the right to learn.

The film moves along two tracks. One is footage: news clips, her address to the United Nations, the upended family life that followed the bullet. The other is hand-drawn animation that brings her childhood to life, along with the legend of the Afghan heroine Malalai, after whom her father named her. Ziauddin Yousafzai, a teacher and activist, isn't kept off-camera; you can see how much of the daughter comes from him, which raises the question buried in the title. He gave her a rebel's name. How much of her courage was her own choice?

Guggenheim rarely reaches for pity and refuses to carve his subject into a saint — he shows an ordinary teenager who squabbles with her brothers and gets shy around boys, then turns to address world leaders. Eighty-eight minutes on how one schoolgirl became the youngest-ever Nobel Peace Prize laureate. It's for anyone after quiet, humane documentary filmmaking with no grandstanding. Stream He Named Me Malala (2015) online on iFILM.