Representation of Hazaras in the Western cinema: the Kite Runner movie and Netflix’s Stateless show

Much of the world knows the Hazaras through the Kite Runner, a story of friendship between a Hazara and a Pashtun boy written by the acclaimed author Khaled Husseini. The book was made into a movie of the same name. It draws a symbiotic relationship between the representatives of two ethnic groups with a very hostile past.

The plot goes like this. Two teenage boys, one Hazara and another a Pashtun are friends and fly kites together in Kabul before the war. Other Pashtun boys bully the Pashtun boy (Amir), but the Hazara boy (Hassan) stands for him. Hassan gets raped defending him, but Amir chickens out. Following the incident, Amir cuts his friendship with Hassan and later moves to the USA with his father. Hassan gets killed in by the Taliban protecting Amir’s house. His son, Sohrab, ends up in an orphanage. Amir makes a dangerous journey to save Sohrab. In the story, eventually, the Pashtun boy Amir emerges as the savior of the son of his Hazara friend.

The Netflix TV “stateless” show is about refugees in Australia that draws almost the same relationships. A non-Hazara man married to a Hazara woman with two children is on a journey to save his Hazara family.