Father of "The Kite Runner" actor says movie release delayed
The company producing "The Kite Runner" movie has delayed the release until both of the main actors leave their native Afghanistan , father of a 12-year-old boy starring in the film said.
The New York Times reported Thursday that the studio distributing the movie, Paramount Vantage, was postponing the movie's release to give three of its child actors the chance to leave Kabul, out of concern they could be attacked over a culturally inflammatory rape scene.
"The Kite Runner," based on the 2003 best-selling novel by Afghan-American writer Khaled Hosseini, tells the story of two boys and the transformation of their relationship through that act of violence. The story's main character, Amir, witnesses the rape of his friend, Hassan, but does nothing to stop it.
"The Kite Runner" was originally scheduled for U.S. release in late November, and a new release date has yet to be announced.
Paramount Vantage has "promised us that they will solve whatever problem that we have now or we might have in the future," said Ahmad Jaan Mahmidzada, whose 12-year-old son Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada plays Hassan.
"They also said that they have delayed the release of the film until they take me and my son out the country," Mahmidzada told The Associated Press.
He added that the film company would gauge the reaction of people after its eventual release and then decide how to help the family afterward.
Ahmad Khan was paid US$10,000 (EUR7,088) to portray Hassan. But the boy told The AP last month that he was not given an advance copy of the script and that he would never have taken the role had he known Hassan was raped. His family said they found out about the scene only days before it was shot.
Mahmidzada worries the story will stir ethnic tensions because it plays on stereotypes of Afghan ethnic groups, pitting a Pashtun bully against a lower-class ethnic Hazara boy.
Pashtuns, Afghanistan's largest ethnic group, and the Hazara minority were among several ethnic-based factions that fought bitterly during the Afghan civil war in the 1990s. Thousands of Hazaras were slain as the predominantly Pashtun Taliban seized power in the mid-1990s. // Pravda.Ru
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