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Technical data
Original title:
The Kit Runner
Genre:
Dramatic
Director:
Mark Forster
Interpreters:
Khalid
Abdalla (Amir), Atossa Leoni (Soraya), Shaun Toub (Rahim Khan), Zekiria
Ebrahimi (Amir giovane), Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada (Hassan giovane),
Homayoun Ershadi (Baba), Said Taghmauoi (Farid), Ali Danesh Bakhtyari (Sohrab).
Nationality: United States
Distribution:
Filmauro
Year : 2008
Origin: United
States (2007)
Subject:
taken from the homonymous romance by Khaled Hosseini
Arrangement of
scenes: David
Benioff
Photography
(Scope/in colours ):
Roberto Schaefer
Music:
Alberto Iglesias
Montage:
Matt Chessé
Time:
131'
Production:
William
Horberg, Rebecca Yeldham, E. Bennett Walsh
DVD:
Euro 15,99
Note:
Candidate Golden Globe
2008 as best Foreign Film and for the best sound column
The plot
The hunter of kites is
taken from
the homonymous romance of the American writer of Afghani origin, Khaled
Hosseini. The film unfolds through the latest thirty years of the
Afghani life, which sowed destruction and death all over the country:
the end of monarchy and the Russian invasion, the Taliban regime and
today’s situation. The story is that of Amir and Hassan, two young
friends belonging to different ethnic and social classes. The first is a
son of the most influential Pashtun of Kabul, the second is his little
Hazara servant. Amir and Hassan are inseparable and their passion for
the kites strengthens the bond even more. But one day, a dramatic event
upsets their life and their friendship: Amir is present at the rape of
Hassan on behalf of a group of teppists, without intervening to his
help. After the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet troops, Amir runs
away with his father to the United States. There he grew to be a man,
realising the most important phases of his life: school, matrimony,
profession of writer. However, the repentance of not having helped his
friend will keep on covering his new existence like a shadow. On
receiving a non expected phone call, Amir understands that the time has
come for him to go back to his country. He does not find his world in
Kabul, not even his friend. Besides the phantasms of the past and of his
conscience, he is welcomed in Kabul by the discovery that Hassan is his
brother and that his death has left his son in the hands of violence. A
hostile and cruel reality, where beauty is banned and the kites do not
fly any more.
Let us
cover the phases once again
«I became the person I
am today at twelve years, on a gelid winter day, in 1975. I remember the
precise moment: I was crouched behind an almost collapsing clay wall
and was peeping into the path of the iced torrent. This happened many
years ago, but it is not true, as many say, that the past can be buried.
In fact, the past clasps the present tightly with its clutches. I have
been peeping, hidden into that desert path, for the past twenty-six
years and today I become aware of it”. These words were pronounced by an
adult Amir who has been living in America for twenty years among the
memories of his childhood whose contours have never been lost by him.
These words throw light on a tormented past, but also on the suffered
decision of returning as a pilgrim to the land of friendship and
betrayal. A backwards pilgrimage to find memories and regrets once
again; a journey of purification and deliverance within one’s own heart
and history. On the background of the actors, the film covers afresh the
historical journey of Afghanistan that, in these latest thirty years,
has lived the gradual destruction of its culture: With massacred and
tortured bodies, with feelings and ideas of those who have survived. On
his return to Kabul, Amir will find not only the old senses of guilt,
but also a desolate country, inhabited by human wreckages which have
lost beauty and joy. His perturbation before the past, his desire to
fill in the vacuum and absences, enwrap and drag the spectator along an
interior journey towards the discovery of obscure aspects of life.
It is a struggle made up of errors and ransoms that we conceal in the
corners of our souls, without always being aware of it. The mind of
Amir, full of colours and far off perfumes, of old and unexplored
knowledge, becomes a refuge for the secret part of self, which is common
to everyone of us.
Let us
reflect on the words
by the author of the
book Khaled Hosseini.
«I have come back to
Afghanistan after 27 years. I left it when I was eleven years old and
have come back at thirty-eight. I have really felt like Amir who says,
“I feel as if I were a tourist in my own country”. I, too, have
experienced this sensation, “7 years are too long a period of time.
Afghanistan has fought a war against the Soviets, enormous changes and
so on and so forth; there have been the horrible years between the
mujaheddin, the Taliban, the 11th September, thus on my
coming back, on one side I felt like Amir in the book and in the film,
in the sense that I recognised the quarters, the people and the music.
There is a scene in which Amir says “This place has the same odour as
that it had long ago”. On the other side the places were very much
changed and I, too, had changed, so much as it would be stupid to
simulate of being still part of this context. I have truly felt as an
outsider when I have come back to Afghanistan, though at the same time I
have felt of coming back home. Thus, it has been somehow a
schizophrenic experience. The persons I have met in Kabul have not
allowed me to feel a stranger; they have opened their heart to me,
asking about my life, welcoming me warmly, with no antagonism as,
instead, I expected. However, I have never pretended to be of this
context, because in reality I am not in it”.
From the communication
of the Paramount vantage.
«The four little actors
of the ‘Hunters of kites’ left Afghanistan after the recommendations of
different ONG (non government organisations) and of Afghani experts”.
The life of the two protagonists might have been in danger, thus it was
decided to postpone the projection of the film, so that the young actors
might expatriate. Their security and tranquillity have always been our
priority and we are happy of having taken them to a secure and welcoming
place before the presentation of the film.
Of Theresa Sarti Stradi,
Emergency president, “Until we decide to fight violence with violence,
there will be no way out, but only death and destruction. The people of
Afghanistan have experienced this even too much”
Of Latif Ahmadi,
director of the state organism Afghan Film,
«on the basis of the
instructions given by the Ministry of Information an Culture, the Hunter
of Kites is banned. Some of its scenes are discussable for some persons
and could provoke reactions and problems for the government and the
population”.
Pastoral
use
The Director Mark
Forster goes again with creative faithfulness along the passionate and
involving history of the homonymous book: The hunter of kites,
The film proceeds through an investigating plot which covers various
thematic aspects: father and children, friendship a cheating, fear and
courage, betrayal and redemption. The whole thing is covered by the
devastation of the country, Afghanistan, annihilated in its own cultural
patrimony and every certainty of future perspective. The passing
forwards of images takes us from the United States to Afghanistan and
vice-versa, in a fascinating reticulate of sensations, in which stories
are confused and the tragedy of the people materialises. Forster creates
again skilfully the far off time of Amir’s childhood, a time full of
life, wrapt in a frame made up of unforgettable moments spent with
father and friends in a Kabul that exists no more. The competitions of
kites are revived in his fantasy as in the time of his secure and happy
infancy. A welcoming place made up of hospitable environments, of land
burnt by the summer sun and the biting wind of winter. The film is a
hymn to the wounded memory, that unfolds through sensations and memories
full of regrets and of a painful certainty that the motherland, in whose
sky yesterday the splendid colours of the kites shone, today is covered
with blood and of death. The kites will come back to fly, but in the sky
of the United States. The hands and the heart of Amir palpitate in
synchrony, while he takes again the thread of the kite and of its past,
finally unbinding the old and painful repentance. The flying of the
kites, in the fascination of a multicoloured entwining, becomes an
embrace of life and the flight a freeing ransom that opens us to hope in
a better future.
Thematic:
Children; Family
–parents children; Literature; Politics-Society; Power; History.
Evaluation on behalf of
National Centre of Evaluation film by the Italian Episcopal Conference:
Acceptable/
problematic *
The film
in the printing press
«Taken from the
bestseller of Khaled Hosseini, it is a transposition of a great
narrative power. Poetic, emotional, spectacular, moving. With the
premise that it is always dangerous to have read and loved a book from
which a film is taken, it is unavoidable to give an account of it.
First of all, we must say that The hunter of kites by Mark
Forster is a very beautiful film: intense actors, fascinating historical
reconstructions, powerful narration. Yet, the complex perturbance, that
the bestseller of Khaled Hosseini has been able to arouse in the reader,
is not completely returned” (Cristina Borsetti, www. film.tv.it).
« The story of an
infantile cowardice -paid with a long expiation and finally with an act
of generous courage- runs on the background of Afghanistan tormented by
the Soviet invasion and by the dominion of the Taliban. Mare Forster
illustrates a dramatic romance with millions of copies” (Claudio Carabba,
Corriere della Sera Magazine, 10 April 2008).
«To adapt the very
beautiful story narrated by the writer Khaled Hosseini, the Director
Mark Forster chooses the simplest and most direct way of sentiment. He
does not allow himself to be tempted by the historical saga nor by
style exhibitions, pointing everything on the faces of the little
protagonists. Overwhelmed by sorrow, we shall take for ever in our eyes
the snub little face, a little crooked, of Hassan, from the Hazara
ethnic class (Ahmad Khan Mahrnoodzada), the prodigious hunter of kites,
friend and faithful servant of Amir, peaceful up to sacrifice. Equally
vibrant are the air images of Kabul (reconstructed in China) dominated
by the vote (or flight) of the flying deer. The remaining part of the
film goes straight to the purpose: to narrate the Historical sorrow of
the Afghani people dried up first by communism and then by the Taliban,
together with the feeling of guilt in Amir, who has not known how to
defend the aggressed friend” (Piera Detassis, Panorama, 3 April,
2008).
«The arrangement of
scenes reveals a solid and severe commitment. Faithful to the text, but
intelligently, it exposes its salient phases with a happy essential
style, minding above all to express its sense and climate, more than the
bookish scheme. The finale, perhaps more optimistic than the way the
literary author had seen it, yet anyhow with dry lyric accents,
finishes by moving the hearts.” (Gian Luigi Rondi, Il Tempo, 28
March 2008).
«The hunter of kites
by the eclectic Mark Forster, taken from the bestseller of
Khaled Hosseini, is a very correct adaptation, inhabited by just faces
and a wise montage between past and present. In some moments it returns
the enormous power of the papery history. In other moments (the banal
acting of Amir’s father), the many fans of the romance will twist the
nose. Perhaps it should have required three hours. Anyhow “it is a work
that flies high without ever falling down”. (Francesco Alò, Il
Messaggero, 28 March 2008).
Courtesy of Teresa
Braccio
Centre of Paoline Communication and Culture e
Via del
Castro Pretorio, 16 - 00185 Roma
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