With Khaled Hosseini at the World Premiere of Kite Runner

Tonight I attended the world premiere of The Kite Runner. Here´s the background of the movie from the Wikipedia as well as the background on the novel that inspired the movie.

The Kite Runner tells the story of Amir, a well-to-do Pashtun boy from the Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul, who is haunted by the guilt of betraying his childhood friend Hassan, the son of his father’s Hazara servants. The story is set against a backdrop of tumultuous events, from the fall of the monarchy in Afghanistan through the Soviet invasion, the mass exodus of refugees to Pakistan and the United States, and the Taliban regime.

The movie is a must see. It´s well acted by Farsi speaking actors who are now involved in a controversy that could actually be part of the movie itself. It turns out that the child actors and their parents who are unable to separate fiction from reality are now concerned that the rape seen that is not graphic and looks more than a beating than a rape will make it impossible for the child actors to go out and meet with their friends who will think that they were actually raped. If anything this type of world view by the actors and their parents complements what the movie portrays and that is that Afghan society is extremist in its views and unable to distinguish symbolism from reality. The story of the characters in the movie is a story of pride, guilt, abuse, humiliation, extreme violence. One unusual element in the story is that that this movie is mostly a story of men. The only potent seen with an Afghan woman is one in which all you see is this woman getting brutally stoned to death.