One of the more highly anticipated movie releases this fall is an adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s enormously popular bestseller The Kite Runner, but it looks as if most of us will have to wait until after Christmas to see it. According to The Washington Post, the planned early November release has been pushed back so that the film’s two child stars – Afghan natives Zekeria Ebrahim and Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada – can be evacuated from the country.
The move follows warnings that the two boys could face reprisal attacks over a scene in which Hassan, played by Ahmad Khan, is raped by an ethnic Pashtun thug.
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Abdul Latif Ahmadi, president of Afghan Film, the state-run film company, said he and many others repeatedly warned The Kite Runner filmmakers, including producer E. Bennett Walsh and director Marc Forster, that that scene could provoke dangerous problems among religiously conservative Afghans, who might find it insulting.
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“This is the mentality of the people in Afghanistan,” which has a 28 percent literacy rate, Ahmadi explained. “People don’t realize that it’s not true. When they watch a film, they accept it — it’s real, why did they do it?”
The film will be given a limited U.S. release on Dec. 14, in order to qualify for Oscar consideration, but it won’t open widely until sometime in January. The film won’t be released in Afghanistan at all, but, as The Washington Post points out, Afghanis will likely have many opportunities to see it on bootleg DVDs.
