Categories: films
Date: 25 July 2009 13:38:59
About a year or so ago, I read The Kite Runner by Khaled hosseini and was absolutely gripped by the page-turning story. Many people have blogged about the story and so I will not rehearse the plot here.
I missed the film when it was on general release but have just seen the film on DVD and have thoroughly enjoyed watching it. It was not, in all honesty, quite as gripping and poignant as the book, but that cannot be helped given that a writer has so much more time to build up the story and characters. The aspect that interested me much more - and this is where a DVD with its extra features provides so much added value - (crumbs... sorry about that: I sound like one of my translations) was the fact that although the book had originally been written in English (one reason it did not qualify for blogging about), the film was shot mainly in Dari.
I am no film buff but I cannot think of any Western-made films where the script was translated into a foreign language for shooting - except of course where they are remade so that they are then shot in English.
Hats off to Marc Forster the Swiss director who insisted that the characters speak Dari in the Afghanistan shots and a mixture of English and Dari in the scenes shots in the US.
The actors were drawn from Afghani communities all over the world: Britain, France, Iran, the US and Afghanistan. Some of them had to learn the Dari accent as they were Farsi speakers (very similar languages - different pronunciation). The lead actor, Khalid Abdalla, who plays the grown-up Amir, is actually Egyptian. His mother tongue is Eyptian Arabic but he apparently learned Dari in 6 weeks to the extent that he could not only deliver his lines but also hold conversations with the native-speaking Dari actors. In an interview clip he spoke English like a public schoolboy - and in the film he had an American accent when living in San Fransisco*.
A lot of people seem not to like reading subtitles on films. I didn't find that it detracted from the film at all. On the contrary, I felt that hearing the characters speak in their own language was entirely natural and added greater depth.
Another astonishing thing was that the two main child actors both from Kabul, whose performances were beautiful, (Hassan's ever-happy smile was delightful), had never been to the cinema. Their first trip was to see themselves in The Kite Runner. They must be true naturals.
*Edit: I've just looked him up. He was born in Glasgow, educated at Kings College school, Wimbledon (so I was right about the public school accent!) and read English at Cambridge. That'll account for his very British-sounding English accent, then. (So he's probably bilingual in Arabic and English - the film director gave the impression that the actor was Cairo born and bred.)