anned gives the audience a look into the type of people that Makhmalbaf and his cousin were as young adults, scared but sure in their purpose. The scene also allows us to step out of the knowledge that this is staged and shows us the characters as people, not actors. It is a sudden and surprising scene that catches the audience off guard, and makes them see the realness of the situation. By combining this with the documentary feel of the film Makhmalbaf allows us to suspend our disbelief for a brief instant and plunges us into what his reality was at that time.The policemans reality is vastly different from that of Makhmalbafs. The most conspicuous example of this occurs when the stabbing incident is staged for the initial time. The policeman becomes aware for the first time that the girl he thought he was falling in love with was actually an accomplice of young Makhmalbaf. He immediately puts a stop to the scene and leads his younger self away from the filming. By our empathy towards the policeman who has lived with the memory of a love he though he had lost for his entire life, it is driven home to us how two people who are involved in the same event can perceive it differently. It is a hard truth for the policeman to face. He needs to reconcile this part of his history, which has suddenly changed for him, with his own new feelings of self-doubt. The policeman was so self-assured up until that moment; he had probably played the stabbing over and over in his mind ever since it happened and thought he had a handle on the truth. In a way his innocence was shattered and lost at that moment. To have what you think of as the truth ripped away from you so suddenly is a life changing experience.The final scene in A Moment of Innocence reflects the life changing aspect of this story on all the persons involved. In a documentary the final scene in A Moment of Innocence would have been the failed attempt of young Makhmalbaf to retrie...