Television actor Reem Shaikh plays the lead role in Gul Makai, an upcoming biopic of Pakistan-born education activist and Nobel Laureate Malala Yousafzai. Directed by Amjad Khan and written by Bhaswati Chakrabarty, the movie will be released on January 31.
Yousafzai has previously been the subject of the documentary He Named Me Malala by David Guggenheim in 2015.
‘Gul Makai’ was the pseudonym used by Yousafzai in 2009 for her blog about life under Taliban rule in the Swat Valley. On October 9, 2012, Taliban gunmen shot at Yousafzai and two other girls. Yousafzai took a bullet in her head and had to be airlifted to Birmingham in the United Kingdom for treatment. She was 15 years old at the time.
After her recovery, Yousafzai became a prominent activist for the right to education. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with India’s Kailash Satyarthi.
Gul Makai has been in production for some time now. Om Puri, who died in 2017, is in the cast alongside Pankaj Tripathi and Mukesh Rishi. Atul Kulkarni plays Malala’s father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, and Divya Dutta plays her mother, Tor Pekai.