Kabul kite-maker stars behind scenes in Hollywood movie

By Raju Gopalakrishnan

KABUL (Reuters) - A man living in a graveyard in a rubbish-strewn, rundown Kabul district is the unlikely hero behind the scenes of one of Hollywood's most eagerly anticipated movies this year.

Noor Agha is widely acknowledged as the best kite-maker in Afghanistan, where flying and dueling with kites is the closest thing the war-torn country has to a national sport. He is also a champion kite-flyer.

"The Kite-Runner", based on the bestselling novel by an Afghan immigrant living in the United States, hits the screens in November, featuring hundreds of kites painstakingly made by Agha in his shack in a graveyard in Kabul's Ashiqan Arifan area.

He also spent weeks training the movie's teenage protagonists in kite flying and dueling, skills they used on camera when the movie was shot in China last year.

"I got $30 a day for 45 days, teaching them all I knew.

Sometimes I had to smack them when they didn't do well," Agha says, smiling and revealing a missing upper tooth.

He says he hasn't seen any rushes of The Kite-Runner, a story of fatherhood, friendship and betrayal which starts in 1970s Kabul and moves to California's Bay Area and back to Afghanistan when it was ruled by the Taliban.

"I am waiting for it, it's my movie," he says, taking time off from kite making for a cigarette and a cup of unsweetened green tea.