Audiences beguiled by the humanity of Khaled Hosseini’s novel of redemption The Kite Runner will have been relieved to find that the film version remains true to the spirit of the book.
Yet the challenges faced by the filmmakers are greater than the novelist who can summon a long lost era with a few lines of well turned prose. Director Marc Forster and his team were set the daunting task of breathing life into a sweeping story that encapsulates the history of Afghanistan over three decades, seen through the eyes of a young boy who flees his own past to find sanctuary in the United States.
He returns years later, the lure of his homeland and the belated opportunity to make amends for a childhood transgression proving too great to ignore. The character is played by Khalid Abdalla, who proves compassionate and earnestly real in a way that many bigger name actors are not.
He has yearned to act since his schooldays, which, despite appearances, were not spent in Afghanistan, nor Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia or even the adopted American home of his character. For Abdalla was born in Scotland to Egyptian parents, and from the age of four has called SW19 home.
Meeting him soon after watching the film is momentarily disorientating, hearing a softly spoken Englishman where on screen he had been so convincing with his flawless American accent. But it soon becomes clear that getting such details right were of crucial importance to the 26-year-old actor.
"I don’t think I’d have gotten this part without my desire to become as culturally authentic as possible," he explains, "because I know what it feels like to be treated as if that doesn’t matter. To be treated as if a type of gun or haircut is more important than how a whole part of the world lives and speaks. I didn’t want to be guilty of that myself."
The man who had to be coerced into appearing in a production at King’s College School in Wimbledon and developed his love of theatre at the Edinburgh Festival and then Cambridge University, has come a long way in what seems a very short time. A year spent studying his craft in Paris and an eye catching role in United 93 have paved the way for this hugely impressive breakthrough performance.
But opportunity is only part of the story, as his preparation was above and beyond what many would consider the call of their acting duties. In order to understand the man he was about to play Abdalla took himself off to Afghanistan to get a sense of the place and learn Dari, the local language.
"I spent a month there in complete immersion, having four or five hours of Dari lessons a day, and also travelling everywhere referenced in the book and everywhere mentioned in other books I’d been reading. And eating everything, they’ve got a great cuisine. Afghanistan is between the Middle East and India and it’s food at the cross-section of those styles – which happen to be two of my favourites.
"Street food, home food, restaurant food, I went to two weddings, I travelled up to the north of the country through the Salang Pass and saw some stunning landscape. There are bits of it, especially as you go towards the Panjshir Valley which are completely different to the image of Afghanistan that people have. You’ve got these lush valleys of green with snow capped mountains in the distance."
For the Kabul scenes in the film a location across the Afghan border in the eastern Xinjiang Province of China was chosen. "It’s about four or five hours drive from the border, so there’s very similar landscape and cultural influences. Khaled Hosseini’s father was stunned when he saw it, he thought he was back in 1970s Kabul."
Abdalla’s own parents came to visit during the shooting of a wedding scene and ended up in the film. If they ever dreamt that their son would follow them into a secure career in the medical profession rather than the precarious life of an actor, then this must have seemed a timely reminder that he chose the right path. But his ambition – he insists – lies beyond roles defined by ethnicity.
"I do have a desire to play parts that are like the cities and the countries that I’ve grown up in and love, where my background is purely incidental. I’d like to think of the roles that I’ve done as roles, that’s how I think of them, I don’t think of them ethnically, I think of them as great challenges for an actor. United 93, obviously the challenges there are clear, and likewise this film. But I have to follow the best roles that come my way and that’s what I will try and do."
Well aware that in difficult times the generic Arab villain is seen as legitimate shorthand for evil in so many action movies, Abdalla is keen to see this crass stereotype change.
"It would be great if there was ever one film or one book that was transformative, and suddenly made night into day. The Kite Runner is the first major studio film in the history of Hollywood where the first point of contact with Afghanistan is through this family story and not a tale of political violence. People who see the film and have read the book tend to react by saying that they find that so refreshing. It’s not trying to hammer home a political statement, it’s not trying to sell anything to anyone.
"It’s about people who happen to come from Afghanistan and woven into the background is that country’s history over 30 years. The film reaffirms an old principle that I and many other people live by: that what we share is far greater than what makes us different. It saddens me that that idea could ever have been a surprise, but it heartens me that people have responded so positively to this story."