The Kite Runner, one of this season's Oscar players, has been grounded due to concern for its child stars' lives.
Directed by Marc Forster (Finding Neverland) for Paramount Pictures' art-house division, Paramount Vantage, The Kite Runner is based on the 2003 bestselling novel by Afghan-American Khaled Hosseini.
The film chronicles three decades in Afghanistan's tumultuous history, focusing on the lives of Amir (played by Zekiria Ebrahimi), a wealthy boy from the politically powerful Pashtun clan, and his friendship with Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada), the son of his father's servant and a member of the long-suffering Hazara tribe.
At issue is the key scene in which Amir witnesses, but does not intervene in, the brutal rape of Hassan by a Pashtun bully.
Families fear that the three young actors, all Kabul natives, may become targeted by the country's ethnic factions.
"I'm worried people from my tribe will turn against me, even cut my throat and kill me," Ahmad Jaan Mahmoodzada, the father of the movie's star, told the BBC. (The Mahmoodzadas say Ahmad Khan didn't know about the rape scene until the day of shooting.)
Such violence would not be unprecedented. Demonstrations broke out after the film Kabul Express became available on DVD. The Indian movie apparently has a character hurl epithets at a Hazara. The government condemned the offense, but death threats led the actor whose character made the insulting comments to flee the country.
Paramount Vantage ruled out cutting the certain-to-be controversial rape scene, but the studio did decide to postpone The Kite Runner's release, which was originally scheduled for Nov. 2, to give the company time to get the child stars and their families out of Afghanistan.
"At the request of the principal from the boys' school, we have moved the film's release date to December 14th, which is after their academic term," a Paramount Vantage spokesperson said in a statement.
"The situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated greatly since we originally cast the boys for their roles. In watching this change on the ground in Kabul, it became apparent to us we needed an aggressive and comprehensive plan to ensure their safety. To that end, we have been actively working for months with a series of Afghani experts, not for profit organizations, government officials and former U.S. government operatives to carefully monitor the situation and their well-being."
Among those government operatives hired to help advise the studio was John Kirakou, a former CIA officer who made the rounds in both Washington, D.C., and Kabul, seeking input from experts familiar with the Afghan ethnic tensions.
"They wanted to do the right thing, but they wanted to understand what the right thing was," John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer hired to help the studio, told the New York Times.
The experts' consensus was that the film would have an incendiary impact and that the youngsters must leave Afghanistan for their own safety, which would be in doubt once The Kite Runner is released. To its credit, Paramount Vantage heeded the advice.
"We are presently instituting plans so the boys will be out of Kabul during the film's release," added the studio rep. "We are grateful to the boys and their families for their participation in the film and are committed to doing everything we can to ensure their ongoing safety."
Paramount hired Rich Klein—a Middle East expert from Henry Kissinger's New York-based international consulting firm, Kissinger McLarty Associates—to travel to the United Arab Emirates and prepare a safe haven for the children, according to the Times. Klein arranged for visas, housing and schooling.
For their work on The Kite Runner, Ebrahimi and Mahmoodzada were paid about $10,000 each. The film's total production costs were about $18 million.
All told, the Times reports that Paramount has committed to supporting the preadolescent actors until they become adults, a cost estimated to be upward of $500,000.
Update (Jan. 16, 2008 at 2 p.m. PT): Officials announced in December 2007 that the film had been banned from Afghan theaters due to "controversial" scenes depicting the boy's rape and ethnic clashing. However, reports in January suggested that pirated DVDs of the film were available in the country.