Afghan reaction to a rape scene in The Kite Runner caused trouble for the child actor involved, but the film's legacy will be benign, its star tells Patrick Barkham
There is something unexpected about actor Khalid Abdalla. Watch him as the terrified, babyish 9/11 lead hijacker in the harrowing United 93and then see him as the guilt-ridden, middle-aged Afghan-American author in the new film, The Kite Runner, and you would barely believe he is the same person. Nor is there anything about either performance that would suggest the actor is British (his parents are Egyptian doctors who moved to the UK in 1979), that he is just 26, or that he is a Cambridge University graduate born in Glasgow and raised in London.
Two of Abdalla's biggest roles - in United 93and in the hit BBC TV series, Spooks- have seen him playing terrorists. Though they did have more depth than standard stereotypical fare, Abdalla sees it almost as his duty, as a British Arab and Muslim, to resist becoming an Arab screen baddie.
"I will not do something that's misrepresented and stereotyped," he says. "There's a long history of that. I have no desire to be part of it - it's immensely harmful and hurtful to me, my family, to people who look like me, and everyone generally, because it's just not true."
His voice is trembling. "One of my great heroes is Edward Said [the late Palestinian-American intellectual]. In my life, I've been acutely conscious of how the Arab world is represented."
The Afghanistan-born author, Khaled Hosseini, began writing The Kite Runnerin 2001. When it was published two years later, it became a surprise word-of-mouth success, and has now sold millions of copies and been translated into 42 languages. An epic tale of a father and son forced to flee Kabul after the Soviet invasion, it has now become a glossy, two-hour, $20 million (€13.6 million)Hollywood production, directed by Marc Forster, maker of Monster's Ball, Stranger than Fictionand the next Bond film.
Abdalla plays Amir, a successful Afghan-American writer haunted by the fact that he did nothing when he saw his childhood friend and servant, Hassan, a boy of Hazara race, raped by a Pashtun bully. The film covers a lot of ground: the wealthy Kabul prior to Soviet invasion; the Afghan immigrant experience in the US; and Amir's guilt-ridden return to the land of the Taliban in 2000.
Abdalla is convinced that the film is unique: a big-budget tale of family life in Afghanistan that isn't all bombs and beards.
" The Kite Runneris the first film in the history of Hollywood where the first point of contact with that part of the world is a human story, a family story, and not political violence," he says. "It's the first time, in a mainstream way, that this part of the world has been experienced in that way."
It is also, in Abdalla's opinion, more sensitive in its depiction of Afghanistan than most Hollywood films. It tells the story of "the people who have been brutalised" rather than associating Afghanistan "with the people who have brutalised it". But the film has still become embroiled in controversy over a lack of cultural awareness in its use of Afghan children to play Amir, Hassan and Sohrab (the son Hassan goes on to have).
Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada, who plays the young Hassan, and his family have alleged that the film-makers did not tell them about the pivotal rape scene until the day of shooting, and then promised to cut it. While not explicit, the scene is shocking - Hassan drips blood into the snow as he shuffles away. The fact that it is a Pashtun raping a Hazara also risks inflaming ethnic tensions.
"If I knew about the story, I wouldn't have participated as an actor in this film," Ahmad Khan has said, adding that he would fear for the safety and reputation of his family were the film to be screened in Afghanistan. "We won't be able to walk in our neighbourhood, or in Afghanistan at all."
Abdalla learned to fly kites with his three child co-stars in Kabul and "saw how they blossomed as people" during the four-month shoot. He says that Ahmad Khan is "an incredibly bright, vibrant person" in real life, just as he is on film.
"I'm not into pointing fingers, but I happen to know that [the rape] scene was rehearsed two weeks beforehand," he says. "It's not like you can force someone to . . . " He trails off.
Forster, the director, has also denied that the young actors didn't know about the rape scene, saying it was rehearsed twice and there was no objection.
Consultants for Paramount have acknowledged that the studio made a mistake in casting Afghan actors without appreciating "the relationship between the Hazara and Pashtun people". But what is important, argues Abdalla, is that the film-makers took the Afghan families' fears seriously. Alarmed at the possibility of violence against its child stars, Paramount delayed the film's release to enable the boys to be relocated, flying the three stars, now aged between 11 and 14, and their relatives to the United Arab Emirates. The studio says it is paying for their relocation costs and helping their families find work, and has offered to continue to support the young actors until they finish high school.
Still, even if it is judged safe for them to return, their lives have undoubtedly been changed forever.
For Abdalla, though, the most moving theme in the film is actually the relationship between his character, Amir, and his father ("the desire to have your father be proud of you"). Amir has spent his life feeling inadequate before Baba, his bullish, wealthy father. Did Abdalla draw on any personal experience here? Did his own doctor parents disapprove of his sudden discovery of acting, at school at the age of 15?
"My father is very similar to Baba," he says. "He's a big, imposing character, and I call him the same thing. Funnily enough, when a lot of my friends read the book, they pictured my father when they imagined Baba. But there was no disapproval from my parents, no desire from them for me to be a doctor at all. Though there are lots of interesting parallels, the strongest is growing up in a bicultural household, to feel at home in two places. I'm proudly British and proudly a Londoner, but I'm also proudly Egyptian and proudly from Cairo."
Abdalla has been travelling back to Egypt twice a year since he was a child. He speaks fluent Arabic, and when he travelled to Kabul to prepare for The Kite Runner, he learned Dari, the language of much of the film's dialogue, in just one month.
"It sounds ridiculous, but somehow it was possible," he says. "I was having five hours of Dari lessons a day and I was in complete immersion."
He felt he had to "give everything" to sound as Afghan as possible, as he knows what it feels like for a people to be misrepresented by Hollywood caricatures.
"It hurts. And this is the only film of this kind that's been made about Afghanistan," he says. "To go and screw it up like that would just be offensive. I would never be able to forgive myself."
The New York Timesrated Ahmad Khan's acting as "among the great child performances on film", but Abdalla is wary of the hype around his young co-stars. "The frenzy that could surround them could be huge - and hugely detrimental. There's a need to be very careful; they shouldn't be paraded around like monkeys. I know it's been dealt with very sensitively."
Afghans who have seen the film have responded enthusiastically, he adds. "The film is contending with the power of negative hearsay. If all you hear is that there's a rape scene, and it's a Hollywood film, and you don't feel like you're generally well represented by Hollywood, then negative associations start to build. I don't know what the short-term effects will be, but I do know the long-term legacy of the film is one you can be proud of. Just being from the Middle East, I'm so proud of that film. To see that part of the world represented in that way - it's just not happened before."
His voice trembles again. "You don't go and do that sort of
thing unless you really care." -
Guardian service
• The Kite Runneropens on Dec 26
