“The Kite Runner” is easy to love.

It’s a story written in elegantly simple prose that simultaneously humanizes and complicates a people and a region that, amazingly, Americans never — since their attention got quickly diverted to another place, another set of conflicts — had a chance to get to know, even if only in that shallow love-the-people-you-invade/hate-their-leaders kind of way that the American media likes to play it.

But the English teacher in me always thought it would make even a better movie than a book. Without giving away too much, let’s just say that there are story arcs aplenty — and there’s even an American angle to the whole thing.

When I saw the trailer in the theater recently, I was impressed. And from all accounts, the filmmakers have seen this as a labor of love, rather than a commercial bonanza — going so far as to make the film in Dari, an Afghan language.

So it’s incredibly sad to see those same filmmakers be forced to delay the release of the film because of fears that it could endanger the lives of Afghan child actors.

David Halbfinger of the New York Times has the amazing story — that still has a chance for a happy ending. In the meantime, as Halbfinger writer, the situation raises excellent questions concerning “the limits of corporate responsibility, wondering who was exploiting whom and pondering the price of on-screen authenticity.”