THE film He Named Me Malala is a compelling profile of the Pakistani teenager and the campaign that almost cost her her life.

The film begins with how she got her name. Her father was inspired by the story of Malalai of Maiwand (also known as Malala), the Afghani heroine who rallied local fighters against the British troops at the 1880 Battle of Maiwand.

But in a hard-hitting piece of television footage, the scene suddenly switches from the pretty, pastel illustrations that accompanied this folk story to a high dependency hospital bed and images of the stricken 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai, shot in the head by the Taliban.

Two of her young friends, we later learn, were also wounded by the ricocheting bullets that day in 2012.

Cut to a large detached house in Birmingham in 2013, just a year on, but a life away from the Swat Valley where Malala was born and almost died.

“Since I left Pakistan, I don’t understand these new rules of this new world,” she said. But she knows there’s no going back, at least not in the near future. “I have been told I will be shot if I return.”

Her ‘sin’ was speaking out, on increasingly national and international platforms, for the right for girls to be educated.

The year before she was shot, she had begun writing a blog for the BBC Urdu channel about her life during the Taliban occupation of Swat. The following summer, the New York Times made a documentary about her life, and she was nominated for the International Children’s Peace Prize by activist Desmond Tutu.

Startlingly, while another father refused to let his daughter take up the invitation to write that blog, fearing for her safety, Ziauddin Yousafzai – headteacher of his own school and a well-known, outspoken educational activist in his own right – suggested his daughter might like to do it.

It was written under a pseudonym, but it was the start of something – everything? – for Malala.

The film tackles head on the suggestion that Malala is simply treading the road her father laid out for her. The two are incredibly close. “One soul, two bodies,” was how she described it. Indeed, when she came out of her coma, her first words were ‘where’s my father?’

In the film, it was put to Ziauddin: “You named her after a girl who was killed after speaking out. It was almost as if you were saying ‘she will be different from every other woman in Pakistan’.”

“You’re right,” he answered.

Malala says in his defence that, no, her father hadn’t made her do anything she didn’t want to – he had simply made it possible for her to do what she wanted.

And in answer to the question ‘if you were an ordinary girl from the Swat Valley, what would you be doing now?’ she replied: “I am an ordinary girl, but if I’d had an ordinary father I would have two children by now.”

What shines out of the film is a poise and self-assurance way beyond her 19 years, and the quiet consideration, the pause for thought, that happens before she speaks.

‘Are you angry?’ she is asked.

“Never. Islam teaches us humanity, equality, forgiveness,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter if the left side of my face isn’t working or I can’t smile properly or that I’m not hearing in this (left) ear.”

Malala was joint winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, when she was just 17. The average age of previous winners until then had been 62.

However, there are two people who are not in the least impressed by this stateswoman-in-waiting. Her two younger brothers, and they’re having none of it!

She’s annoying. She bullies them, says the impish youngest one, grinning all the while.

For once, Malala looked a little discomposed.