The Innocent (Arabic البرئ, pronounced: Alparee') is an Egyptian feature film, released on 15 August 1986, starring Ahmed Zaki, Gamil Ratib, and Mahmoud Abdel Aziz.
In 2005, Minister of Culture Farouk Hosny, in a rare move for the censorship-heavy region, agreed to show the movie uncut for the first time, 19 years after its production and release with heavy edits (including the removal of the controversial ending) demanded by the Ministers of Interior (Ahmed Rushdi), Defense (Abd Al-Halim Abu-Ghazala), and Culture (Ahmed Abdel Maqsoud Heikal) at the time. The 2005 screening was at the Cairo International Film Festival in honor of the then recently deceased Zaki. Both the songs in the film are sung and composed by Ammar El Sherei and feature lyrics by the poet Abdel Rahman el-Abnudi.
Cast
Ahmed Zaki (Ahmed Saba’a el-Leel) Mahmoud Abdel Aziz (Colonel Tawfiq Sharkas) Mamdouh Abdel-Alim (Hussein Wahdan) Elham Shahin (Nawara) Gamil Ratib (imprisoned geologist) Salah Qabil (Rashad Owais, an imprisoned writer) Hassan Hosny (officer) Ahmed Rateb (prisoner) Nahed Samir (Ahmed’s mother) Hosni Abdeljalil (Abu Bakr Bassiouni) Abdullah Hefni (Abd el-Sabour, Ahmed’s brother) Hassan al-Yamani (village sheikh) Ghareeb Mahmoud (mayor) Abdo Al Wazir (bus passenger) Samir Wahid Badr Nofal Shawqi Shamekh Aleya Abdel Moneim Waseela Hussein Abdelgawad Metwally Mahmoud Al Iraqi Samy Ataya Ahmed Abo Obeya Sami Kamel
Plot
Ahmed Sabe' El Leil (Ahmed Zaki), a young, struggling farmer, is portrayed in the movie serving his conscription year. As a result of his marksmanship, he is chosen as a prison guard. At the prison, he encounters the political prisoners who are treated inhumanely. He follows orders to torture and humiliate the prisoners, and even perform executions. Trucks full of university students who participated in the 1977 bread riots are brought to this prison, among them is his old friend from the village, Hussein Wahdan. Through Hussein the young guard discovers how oppressive and corrupt the government is, and Ahmed refuses to torture Hussein. In the final scene, censored in Egypt, Ahmed opens fire indiscriminately on officers and fellow soldiers until he is shot as a new truck filled with rioting students arrives.
Detailed summary
He lives with his mother and his intellectually disabled brother Abd al-Sabour. Ahmed knows nothing of the world outside his village, where his poverty has blocked him from obtaining an education. To him the nation is a simple concept, his sole homeland and country being his field and the canal in which he cools from the heat, while his enemies are those he can see, and his only entertainment is the grocer where the village youth gather to chatter and mock the gullible (including him). The only university-educated young man in the village, Hussein Wahdan (Mamdouh Abdel-Alim), sympathizes with Ahmed and prevents the other young men from taking their bullying too far, ultimately encouraging him to enlist in the armed forces.
When Ahmed is drafted, he does not understand what conscription means or where he is going, so Hussein explains that the army protects the country from the enemies of the nation, confusing Ahmed who asks “what enemies does our country [i.e. the village] have?” Later, the illiterate recruit is subjected to a medical examination as well as tests on cultural and scientific knowledge. Placing at the bottom of the class, he is assigned to guard an isolated detention center for political prisoners in the desert. There, he is trained to obey orders blindly even if counter to logic.
The prison warden is Colonel Tawfiq Sharkas (Mahmoud Abdel Aziz), an officer who lives a double life as a kind gentleman to his loved ones and a brutal torturer to his charges. Buying a Christmas gift for his daughter, he chooses a lovely guitar over action figures of a soldier and thief. He is magnanimous with a traffic cop who tickets his car for parking in a forbidden space. However, he becomes monstrous in his role as a concentration camp guard abusing detainees to impress his superiors. Ahmed sees the detainees being forced to eat bread from the ground with their hands behind their backs, to which Tawfiq replies: “These are the enemies of the homeland.”