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The author of 2004 best-selling book " Khalid Hosseini"
Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1965. His father was a diplomat with the Afghan Foreign Ministry and his mother was a Dari and History teacher in one of the high schools in Kabul. In 1976, the Afghan Foreign Ministry relocated the Hosseini's family to Paris. After awhile the Hosseini's sought and were granted political asylum in the United States, and in September of 1980, Hosseini's family moved to San Jose, California.
Khalid Hosseini has graduated from high school in 1984 and enrolled at Santa Clara University received his bachelor's degree in Biology in 1988 and then the following year, he joined in University of California-San Diego's School of Medicine in 1993. Khalid Hosseini began writing his first novel "The Kite Runner" in March of 2001 and has published it in 2003, which became an international bestseller book of 2004 and launched in 48 countries and translated in to many different languages. In 2006 he was named a goodwill envoy to UNHCR, "United Nations Humanitarian Commissions for Refugees" Agency. After his return from Afganistan, he started his second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns and it was published in May of 2007 which currently "A Thousand Splendid Suns" is published in 25 countries.
The Kite Runner novel has adopted to a screen play and one of the Hollywood's biggest company has made it a movie on 2007. The casting process for the Kite Runner has started on June 2006 in Kabul by Kate Dowd the casting director and with assistance of me as a casting assistant. It was a good starting for us. After prepration and settling down, we started the first day of casting with the help of Foundation for Culture and Civil Society which I was working there on that time by auditioning for the two main characters " Amir and Hassan" started from Afghan Film Actor's Association, to open calls of Schools, Orphanages, and most training centers.
During the two and half months casting which took place in Kabul me and the casting director Kate Dowd which I loved working with her, have covered more than 10 main famous high schools including "Amani, Istiqlal, Habebia and other local elementaries to high schools, Orphanages such as Tahya-e-Maskan, Shashdarak, Alawudin, Asheyana the main center and districts centers that keeps and trains the street kids which receives fund from foreign donors. They are the biggest orphanages in Kabul and we covered almost 6,000 kids to find the two main heroes of the Kite Runner (Amir & Hassan), until we succeeded to our goal and found the happy and new faces "Zakeria Ebrahimi" 11 years old (As Young Amir) from Istiqlal high School which is one of famous high schools in Kabul and " 12 years old Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzadah" (As Young Hassan) from training center of Afghan Relief Organization in Kabul. Mostly we were covering the schools and orphanages in the mornings and in the afternoons I had to manage the open calls and auditions for the adult actors and actresses which was not easy to find the exact face or the character to match the book.
It was a long road to find our casts in Kabul, from a country which served three decades of war and combat which has lost it's heritage, culture and people and nothing left behind except destruction, but we continued to our aim of finding the stars from going to every private film companies, theater stages and preparing several open call audditions till we found most of the main characters from Kabul to preform in the movie in late septermber of 2006 in China.
After days and months of working hard and searching for the stars, finally we succeeded to find a few people for each character as a back up or to select one out of others in the final cast. We have completed the first process of finding the faces after several weeks of hard work but still we were not done and we had to choose one out of two/three actors in the second term of casting so I was printing a few pages of the script with each characters lines and distributing them to the selected actors to get ready for the final audition. Two days after in late July the hottest month of the summer in Kabul "Mark Forster" the Director and "E. Bennet Walsh" the UPM Producer arrived in to do the final cast and to do some scout for the movie around Kabul. Later of the current week I have called and schedualed all the pre casts, the ones who have been casted in the first process and had a few pages of the script to do the last and final audition for the director.
The cast were arriving on their schedualed times in the morning or in the afternoon and Mark Forster with Kate Dowd were auditioning one by one and recording on tape for final decesion and in mean while we were going for scout around the city when there was extra time between the auditioning scheduals or in the weekend. The process of scouting and auditioning took almost a week and half for the director till he has found his stars to preform in the movie. The final audition for the Kids Amir and Hassan and were not only reading the script infront of the camera, it was the practice of kite flying as well.
After two months of hard work, finally Mark and Kate the movie and casting directors have selected their cast for the movie out of hundreds of people that we have taped and auditioned and it was a relief for me after two months non stop work becuase the casting process is the main and important and as well as the first step of making a movie, and you have to work hard to find the talented actor for the exact character.
The actors that have been casted for the movie is starting with the main two young actors Zakeria Ebrahimi "Amir" Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzadah "Hassan" Ali Danesh Bakhtyari"As Sohrab son of Hassan" Massihullah Gharibzadah "Omer Kite Tournament Master" Nabi Tanha "Ali" Abdul Salam Yusoufzai " Older Assef" Abdul Qader Farookh "General Taheri" Amin Rahimi "Stadium Clerk" Mir Mahmood Shah Hashimi "Bussiness man in Baba Study" Mohamad Nabi Attai "Uncle Saifo Kite Seller" Mohamad Nadir Sarwari "Spice Merchant" Sayed Miran Farhad "Burly Man in Russian Truck" Khalil Ahmad Nooryan "Assef Guard #1" Hameeda Hamraz "Rahim Khan's Neighbor" Ahmad Yasar Zahir Shir Agha "Birthday Singer" Maimoona Ghizal "Jamila Taheri" and me Mustafa Haidari "As Party Worker". These are the 17 cast members who were cast in Afghanistan.