A project by Yussuf Janessar
Since the early beginning of the resistance against the invasion by the Soviet army, Ahmad Shah Massoud developed a particular sense of military strategy. With a modern conception of war, he organized a political, social and military system. Among the tools he used in his military strategy, film recordings played a central role. They allowed the preparation of attacks by careful location scouting, and they were valuable tools for monitoring the assimilitation of fighting technics of the mujahideen when Massoud could not be present on the operations. The peculiarity of these 4.000 hours of rushes is that it covers 30 years of conflicts alongside Massoud. They are now a priceless archive to participate in the construction of a contemporary history of Afghanistan.
Massoud’s closest cinematographer, Yussuf Janessar, also native of Panjshir Valley, is now working to the construction of the Visual Memory Center of Ahmad Shah Massoud in order to preserve these documents, by digitalizing and indexing them. His purpose is to make these images, together with other written documents that are still possible to collect, accessible to researchers, journalists, historians and political analysts. This highly valuable archive is now at risk, it is urgent to find a solution to the storage of these images.
A WARM Partner Project
Photo ‘Massoud’ by Florent Marcie
