Name: Shadow of Afghanistan
Genre: Documentary, Foreign, War
Released: 2006
Duration: 1 min 50 s

Brief Synopsis

Cast & Crew

Film Details

Genre

Documentary

Foreign

War

Release Date

2006

Technical Specs

Duration

1h 50m

Synopsis

On October 9, 1987, documentary filmmakers Lee Shapiro and James Lindelof were killed during an ambush while making a film about the Mujahideen in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Documentary filmmakers Jim Burroughs and Suzanne Bauman have incorporated the footage created by their fallen comrades into a documentary that fits recent, post-September 11 events into a context that stretches all the way back to 1959 and the reign of King Mohammed Zahir Shah. The timeline then moves through Mohammed Daoud Khan's 1973 coup d'etat and subsequent assassination, the Soviet invasion of 1979, the exile of five million refugees, the rise of the Taliban in the refugee camps, the assassination of Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud in 2001, the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center just 48 hours later, and the subsequent U.S. bombardment of Afghanistan. Burroughs and Bauman return to Tora Bora, once the turf of the Mujahideen and now home to the recently vacated headquarters of al-Qaeda, and find that the land has not really changed much since Biblical times. Finally, the filmmakers examine present-day Afghanistan under Hamid Karzai.