At the time of going to press, the awards of the 11th National Film Festival, which closed yesterday, were not yet announced. Through the week-long annual event, dedicated to Egyptian cinema, 18 features and many documentaries and shorts competed for LE500,000 worth of prizes, while figures like director Mohamed Radi, cinematographer Said El-Shimi and film critic Samir Farid received lifetime achievement awards. The festival's greatest honouree, however, was Ahmed Zaki, whose death of cancer last month deprived Egyptian film of one of its greatest and best loved actors. Perhaps in acknowledgment of the industry's debt to him, the festival opened with the first ever unexpurgated screening of Atef El-Tayeb's Al-Barii (The Innocent, 1986), a cinematic prophesy of the Central Security police mutiny of the same year in which Zaki played the lead. The film marks a highpoint in 1980s film, an arena dominated by such champions of neo-realism as Mohamed Khan, Khairi Bishara and Dawoud Abdel-Sayed, not to mention El-Tayeb himself. Zaki plays Ahmed Sab'elleil, a simple peasant, innocuous and illiterate, with a passion for playing the nai (the traditional Arab flute). He ends up spending his term of army conscription as a Central Security soldier -- in a concentration camp. Told that the inmates he is guarding are enemies of the homeland, he exhibits ruthless ferocity in handling them -- so much so that he kills one, only to be promoted to the post of special guard for the camp chief. Not until the arrival of his relation (Mahmoud Abdel-Aziz ) as an inmate that Ahmed realises the detainees, rather than "enemies", are the victims of a system of oppression. When he refuses to participate in "the reception party" -- an orgy of torture to which newcomers are routinely subjected -- he is demoted to a lower rank. Watching from a guarding tower as the newcomers file into the camp, he opens fire on the soldiers preparing to torture them, killing a number of them before he is finally shot dead. The last shot -- previously cut by the censor, along with the entire shootout, which was deemed too inflammatory and politically inappropriate -- shows Ahmed in a blood bath on the ground, his gun and nai next to him. When it was released in 1986, the film ended simply with the soldier crying out "No" from atop the tower, in a futile attempt to stop the torture.
