On Friday, the Whitney Humanities Center showed an early screening of He Named Me Malala, the forthcoming documentary directed by Davis Guggenheim (the director of An Inconvenient Truth). The documentary tells the story of Malala Yousafzai, the youngest Nobel Prize winner ever, narrating Malala’s upbringing in Swat Valley, Pakistan, and her close relationship with her father. Although the movie effectively captures the origins of Malala’s fight for equality, there are discontinuities and mischaracterizations in the film, which, at times, detract from the narrative.

Interviews with both Malala and her father show how their relationship served as a catalyst for Malala’s need to advocate for equal educational opportunities, particularly after the Taliban took control over her village in Swat Valley. Throughout the movie, the directors emphasize Malala’s father’s desire for all youth to have access to equal education. Using scenes of Malala playing board games and eating with her family, Guggenheim depicts Malala as a normal teenage girl. However, the interviews and the narration of her story also emphasize the importance of the risks she’s taken.

Some editing decisions are effective: Guggenheim includes watercolor animations at certain points of the movie, such as the poignant reenactment of the story of the woman after whom Malala Yousafzai was named. These animations add to the narrative element of such a serious documentary. However, other editing choices detracted from the film. Malala’s story is not told in a linear fashion, and the many jumps between events in the documentary give the viewer a feeling of discontinuity. Additionally, there were transitions where the director abruptly cut from happy scenes of the family playing board games to scenes of the Taliban attacking a school. By the end of the movie, it became all too clear that, whenever a happy scene was shown, a disastrous one was almost sure to follow.

At times, the documentary slipped back into a common tendency to vilify sects of Islam without doing justice to the nuanced nature of feminism and women’s rights that exist in that region. While Malala always repeats that she “grew up in a very progressive family,” the film doesn’t do enough to separate the Taliban’s opposition to women’s education from the beliefs of other Muslims or emphasize other Muslim movements focused on education. Malala is rarely shown talking with other Muslim activists when discussing women’s rights. Instead, she is primarily shown with European or American public figures who support her cause. In spite of these problems of continuity and representation, the documentary is successful in that it portrays Malala the person as opposed to Malala the public figure, the image of her we usually see.