The Kite Runner is a 2007 American drama film directed by Marc Forster from a screenplay by David Benioff and based on the 2003 novel of the same name by Khaled Hosseini.

It tells the story of Amir (Ebrahimi) a well-to-do boy from the Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul who is tormented by the guilt of abandoning his friend Hassan (Mahmoodzada).

The story is set against a backdrop of tumultuous events, from the fall of the monarchy in Afghanistan through the Soviet military intervention, the mass exodus of Afghan refugees to Pakistan and the United States, and the Taliban regime.

[3] The majority of the film's dialogue is in Dari Persian, with the remainder spoken in English and a few short scenes in Pashto and Urdu.

However, after concern for the safety of the young actors in the film due to fears of violent reprisals to the sexual nature of some scenes in which they appear, its release date was pushed back six weeks to December 14, 2007.

In San Francisco in 2000, Afghan-American writer Amir Qadiri and his wife Soraya watch children flying kites.

Arriving home, Amir receives a call from his father's old friend and business associate, Rahim Khan, now in Peshawar, Pakistan.

In a kite-fighting contest, Amir breaks his father's record of 14 "kills", and Hassan runs after the last defeated kite.

In June 1979, when the Soviet Union invades Afghanistan, Baba and Amir flee to Pakistan inside an oil truck, with Rahim being left to care for the house.

In 1988, Baba is running a service station in Fremont, California, and operates a stall at a weekly flea market.

When Amir sees Taheri's daughter, Soraya, he's interested, and gives her a story he has written, but the General confiscates it.

During a stroll, Soraya tells Amir that the Taheris had to move from Virginia, due to the gossip after she had run off to live with a Pashtun man.

Rahim urges Amir to return to Kabul to find Sohrab and give him a letter written by Hassan, who had taught himself to read and write.

The website's consensus reads: "Despite some fine performances, The Kite Runner is just shy of rendering the magic of the novel on to the big screen.

But the terseness of Hosseini's prose has been replaced by the sentimentality of director Marc Forster's approach, and the result is a film that's longer and lusher and gushier than it should have been.

[14] The government of Afghanistan at the time, led by President Hamid Karzai, decided to ban the film from theaters and DVD shops, both because of the rape scene and the ethnic tensions.

"[5][15] For their work on the movie, Zekeria Ebrahimi (young Amir) and Mahmoodzada were initially paid $17,500 (£9,000) each, and Ali Danish $13,700 (£7,000).