Audiences will find no more affecting a presence on cinema screens this year
than Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada. He is the wide-eyed Afghan boy, plucked from the
dusty back alleys of Kabul, who plays Hassan in the film version of The Kite
Runner. Ahmad Khan’s “ranks among the great child performances on film”,
said The New York Times. His name is already in contention for a best
supporting actor Oscar nomination.
Yet when The Kite Runner had its premiere in LA recently, neither Ahmad nor
the three other Afghan boys in the film were there. The children and their
adult guardians had been flown out of Afghanistan by Paramount Pictures days
before, to a secret location in the United Arab Emirates. There were serious
concerns that their lives might be in danger if they stayed, because they
had acted in the film. Paramount has agreed to pay for their education until
they are 18, and will meet their families’ expenses.
Although the studio’s decision has been welcomed, it did not lay to rest
bitter charges that the film-makers had misled the children and their
guardians about the content of the film, and were culturally insensitive to
how acting in a film about sexual violence and ethnic tension would be seen
in such a mainly illiterate and religiously strict country as Afghanistan.
Based on the runaway bestseller by Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner tells of
the friendship in Kabul in the early 1970s between Amir, a wealthy boy from
the dominant Pashtun tribe, and Hassan, a member of the oppressed Hazara
tribe. Their unlikely friendship is destroyed when Hassan is brutally raped
by older Pashtun boys after he has helped Amir win a kiteflying contest.
Amir wit-nesses the rape, but is too cowardly to intervene, a decision that
clouds the rest of his life, even after he and his family move to the USA.
The film-makers have said little about what happened during the shoot and
since, fearing it might inflame the situation and further endanger the
children and their families. But a couple of days after they learnt that the
children were safely out of Afghanistan, the director, Marc Forster, and
producer, Rebecca Yeldham, gave me their side of the story.
“For me, the film is about healing, redemption, forgiveness, loss and learning
to be a better person than you think you are,” Forster says, explaining why
he had been so troubled by the accusations against him. “I believe that it
humanises not only Afghanistan, but the Muslim world in general.”
It’s clear almost all the film’s problems stem from a desire seldom seen in
Hollywood: to be authentic. “It was important to me to be respectful to the
book and Afghan culture,” says Forster, 38, the German-born, Swiss-raised
director of Monster’s Ball and Finding Neverland, who will helm the next
Bond. “I just couldn’t see these two kids flying kites in Kabul
in the 1970s and speaking English. It would have been Hollywoodised in the
worst way.”
“To get the studio to agree that much of the film would be shot in the Dari
language was a really hard-fought battle,” Yeldham says. “We were talking
about a movie with an epic scope, but we were going to be casting unknowns
and shooting much of it not in the English language. The studio wasn’t
convinced of the economics. We just kept trying to emphasise that we wanted
to touch people’s hearts, and that the way to do that was to cast it right
and render it in a language and a world that felt true.”
When Paramount and Dream-Works finally agreed to finance the film, on the
relatively low budget of $18m, the team initially scoured the USA and Europe
for Afghan children. But almost all the ones they saw, Yeldham says, seemed,
in exile, to have lost the qualities of “wonder and innocence” they were
looking for. The team finally went to Kabul, and, after a month and a half,
had found the four main children. “Ahmad is intelligent way beyond his years
and has incredible sensitivity; he just knows,” Forster says. “At the same
time, he has this passion for life, and an incredible smile.”
Ahmad was 12 when the film was made. An ethnic Hazara, he lived with his
family in a poor neighbourhood on the outskirts of Kabul. He and Zekeria
Ebrahimi, who plays the young Amir, spent three months learning kiteflying,
an ancient Afghan sport banned by the Taliban. Zekeria’s life reflects the
tragedy of Afghanistan. His father was killed by a rocket in Kabul two
months before he was born, and his mother deserted him and his sister after
they had fled to a refugee camp in Pakistan.
Yeldham says that they were encouraged to shoot the film in situ by the
state-run Afghan Film and other local organisations, but decided that,
because of the devastation of Kabul by years of occupation and civil war,
and the resulting inadequacy of its infra-structure, they would shoot in
Kashgar, in western China, a city reminiscent of the Kabul Khaled Hosseini
remembered from his childhood. Hosseini and his family fled Afghanistan in
the late 1970s and now live in California.
Some months after production ended, the first rumblings of trouble were heard.
In January, Dean Nelson, a reporter with this newspaper, interviewed the
boys and their families in Kabul. Ahmad told him he was worried for his
safety because of what people might think about the rape scene. “I want to
continue making films and be an actor, but the rape scene upset me because
my friends will watch it and I won’t be able to go outside any more,” he
said. “They will think I was raped.” The report in The Sunday Times
sufficiently alarmed the producers that Yeldham and her co-producer, Bennett
Walsh, flew to Kabul to check on the children. Although they were assured
they were in no immediate danger, more than 20 local experts, diplomats and
people working with Afghan NGOs were seconded to keep an eye on them. The
film-makers also took a look at local initiatives they and their backers
were helping to finance, including the Afghanistan Relief Organisation,
teacher training and the construction of rural libraries. But other
accusations surfaced. Ahmad Jaan, Ahmad’s father, said he was worried that
“people from my own tribe will turn against me because of the story. I am so
worried they may cut my throat, they may kill me, torture me”. Ahmad and his
father also claimed they had been misled by the film-makers about the rape
scene. “They said the movie is about kiteflying and nothing else,” said
Ahmad Jaan.
Forster and Yeldham strongly deny that the boy or his father were misled about
the scene, the most crucial in the film. In at least two meetings, it was
explained to Ahmad Jaan that his son was “going to play a character where he
is the hero of the story, the most honourable character, but he is going to
be subjected to a violent sexual assault by other boys”, says Yeldham.
Forster says that when, after rehearsing the scene twice, Ahmad told him he
did not want to have his trousers pulled down, he agreed at once. “I said,
‘Fine, I don’t need it’,” Forster recalls. “I always saw the scene as
impressionistic anyway. After we shot it, everybody was happy – we didn’t
hear anything else until these stories in the newspapers.”
Yeldham believes that while they were filming in China, rumours spread in the
mainly illiterate Hazara community in Kabul. “The book was well known among
the educated classes, and they understood this was a positive story that
represented a view of Afghan culture that was beautiful and honourable,” she
says. “But when Ahmad came back, none of the people where he lived had read
the book, and they were hearing he had been in some kind of sex film in
which there was rape and sex.”
In August, Paramount paid for John Kiriakou, a retired CIA operative, to go to
Kabul to reassess the situation. Kiriakou found it had seriously
deteriorated. A specialist on Islam at the US State Department “nearly
wept”, envisioning a “Danish cartoons situation”. A Hazara member of
parliament told him that, because of the film, Pashtun and Hazara “would be
killing each other every night”. Paramount immediately decided the children
should be taken out of Afghanistan at the end of the school year, in early
December. The studio also delayed the opening of the film by six weeks, to
mid-December, in case pirated DVDs ended up in Afghanistan.
Now the children are safely in the UAE, Yeldham hopes the message of the film
can come through to Afghans and other audiences. “I’ve seen the profound
impact it has on Afghans,” she says. “They feel that, for the first time
ever, they are seeing their culture on the screen in a way which reflects
its richness and sophistication.
“As for the kids, my greatest hope is that, in time, they will come to be
proud of what they did.”
The Kite Runner opens on Dec 26
