The Kite Runner is a controversial, though sensitive movie. Directed by Marc Forster, it represents a highly straightforward and effective adaptation of author Khaled Hosseini’s international best selling novel with the same name.  However, although it was nominated for two Golden Globes, The Kite Runner has already become a controversial movie, because of a rape scene that involves one of its young actors.

Because of this scandal, the theatrical release of the movie was delayed with six weeks and its three young actors had also to be protected by the studio against possible violent backlashes. However, despite this controversy that The Kite Runner has already created, this film also represents a faithful rendition of Khaled Hosseini’s best selling novel that should as well garner critical and award recognition, and the attention of the discerning audiences.

The story within the movie is told in three distinct sections. The first one is set in 1978, in Afghanistan, and focuses one the fateful friendship of two boys: Amir, played by Zekeria Ebrahimi, who lives with his sophisticated widower father, and Hassan, played by Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada, who is the son of Amir’s father’s faithful servant. Because the two boys share a common interest in American action movies and in flying kites, they also share a special bond.

But the boys’ lives will be forever changed when Hassan angers some bullies from the neighborhood and gets eventually raped by one of them. His friend Amir will be too frightened at the moment to do something and he will keep silent afterward. But the issue will haunt him throughout the years; even after he and his father have relocated to California in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion, Amir will regretfully remember the incident.

Ten years later, the film shows Amir as an adult and as an aspiring writer, played by Khalid Abdalla. He will meet the daughter of another Afghan expatriate and he will eventually fall in love and marry her after a traditional old-fashioned courtship.
Then, in the last section of the movie, which is set in 2000, Amir will be shown as an already famous author, happy despite his father’s death and the couple’s incapacity to have children. However, one day Amir will be called by an old family friend who will tell him that Hassan had died and that his son, played by Ali Dinesh, has been abandoned to an orphanage.

So Amir, who still feels guilty because he didn’t save Hassan when they were children, will decide to go back to the now dangerous city of Kabul to rescue the young boy and to bring him to America. Surprisingly or not, the child will bear an unexpected connection to his late father’s old friend.

The Kite Runner is a very sensitive movie about friendship, life and death. Despite controversy, Marc Forster directed young Hassan’s raping scene in a discrete but effective manner; however, it is not the rape that really counts in this movie.

The Kite Runner is a movie you should not miss!