Child hero of Afghan film 'The Kite Runner' finds new home in Sweden

Five years after he shot to stardom with his portrayal of Hassan, the 10-year-old servant boy in the film The Kite Runner, Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada stood shivering by a river somewhere in the Baltics.

He had just swum across the border from Belarus and was stood there for eight miserable hours, his clothes soaking wet, before his next set of contacts came to pick him up.

This, though, was not another film set but real life - the youngster having put himself in the hands of people smugglers who spirited him 4,000 miles to a new home in Sweden.

“Sometimes we couldn’t get food for two days," he recalls. "We couldn’t ask for it either, because the people smugglers had such bad behaviour that everybody was scared of them."

Now 17, Ahmad still has the quick wit and ready humour that he first showed in The Kite Runner, which won a Golden Globe in 2007 for its portrayal of life in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion and the Taliban regime.

But far from bringing him fame and fortune in his native land, his acclaimed performance - for which he earned just $15,000 - has forced him into exile.

During the shooting of the film, Ahmad claims that producers agreed to delete a scene in which the character he plays is sexually assaulted by an elder boy.

“They asked us, ‘what’s the problem if this scene is in the movie?’”, Ahmad remembers. “We said that the problem is that if it is, we cannot live in Afghanistan.”

They were right. The scene was in the end included, and, as predicted, proved too much for Afghanistan’s culturally conservative society. The film was banned there, and Ahmad and his father spent the next two years living in exile in Dubai, with the film company paying their upkeep.

When their family were unable to get visas to join them - despite claiming they were being threatened by the Taliban - Ahmad returned home with his father, only to find himself still a marked man.

At one point a brick was thrown through the window of his car as he was being driven through Kabul’s back streets, shattering the windscreen. “The attacker shouted to all the people around, ‘It was him who was in the film, and this film was not good to our culture’”, he remembers.

The rape scene in the film was particularly sensitive as it touched not just on sexual taboos but ethnic ones as well. In the film, Ahmad plays a members of the downtrodden Hazara ethnic group, who are mainly Shia Muslims, while his assailant is identified as a Pashtun, a Sunni ethnic group that makes up much of the Taliban's ranks. The Hazaras claim to have been the victim of frequent persecution during the Taliban's rule.

“Even the Hazaras, the group I am from, did not accept me,” Ahmad remembers. “They were saying, ‘why were you in that film? We are not as weak as you showed us’. And the Pashtun, they were saying, ‘We are not as bad as you showed us. We never did anything like that to a Hazara.’”

Today - three years on from his journey by people smuggler - the 17-year-old is well-established in Borlange, a small city in a part of Sweden best known for its deep forests and sparkling lakes. He sports a spangly ear-ring and sculpted hair, plays for a local football team, and now lives with a Swedish foster family, through whom he is acquiring fluency in Swedish.

On Thursday, he also began studying at a local sixth-form college, joining a mainstream Swedish school for the first time.

His old life is now a distant memory, as is the long journey in the backs of trucks across Central Asia to Moscow, the Baltics and Sweden.

But the best thing, he says, is that he no longer sees his childhood performance as something to be ashamed of. Instead, he finds himself something of a local celebrity.

“When people found out that I was the guy who was in Kite Runner, they all told me what a good job I did,” he says, remembering his amazement that people actually liked the film. “Many of them, they cried, even. They never expected that an actor from the Kite Runner would be a refugee in Sweden.”

The late acclaim has even reignited the interest in acting that got him involved in the first place in the film, in which he plays an assistant to a friend who competes in kite-flying duels, where the aim is to cut the strings of an opponent's kite.

He is joining the media studies stream at his college, and dreams of going to film school.

Next month he will also be on the judging panel at a local film festival, and earlier this year he spoke at an art cinema whose organisers gave him a kite as a good will gift.

“Actually I’ve never flown it,” he admits. “Of course I know how to fly a kite, but Afghan kites are nothing like the one they gave me.”

It also might now go down too well in Sweden to sever one's neighbour's line.