The Innocent

Here’s a Egyptian classic film you should try to get hold of its uncensored copy.

I found online, via Torture In Egypt Blog, the uncensored finale of Ahmad Zaki‘s 1986 movie “Al-Bare’e” (The Innocent), where he plays the role of a naive peasant police conscript, brainwashed to torture dissidents in prison by the sadist prison sheriff (played by Mahmoud Abdel Aziz), as “enemies of the nation” or “spies” or whatever.

Our innocent conscript however gets disillusioned when one day a young fellow from his village shows up among a new patch of student detainees sent to the torture factory.. Zaki spontaneously tries to protect the young man (played by Mamdouh Abdel Alim) from the “welcome party” arranged for the detainees in prison, while screaming he knew the detainee and that he could not have been a “traitor” or a bad guy.. Zaki ends up in trouble, while the young detainee dies.

The final part of the movie was censored by the government, though bootlegged copies were always in circulation, depicting Zaki, released from confinement and back on the job, climbs up the tower, spots a new group of detainees being shipped in, so he decides to shoot the sheriff and the soldiers.

The official version of the film, which the government allowed, only showed Zaki screaming “No” and then the screen freezes. The uncensored edition however was shown public only once in 2005 when the Minister of Culture decided to honor Zaki’s memory during the Cairo Film Festival.

Enjoy!