In 2013, Abdelrahman ElGendy is a 17-year-old fledgling activist as students like him take to Cairo’s streets in protest against a military coup. Only two years earlier, they’d been swept up in the hope of Egypt’s January 25th revolution. During one mass demonstration, in which Abdelrahman is present as a bystander recording the fervor from his car while his Baba, in the driver’s seat, tells him to put your hand inside , police arrive. They brutally attack protestors and drag Abdelrahman and his Baba away.

What follows is a journey from a jail cell to a pre-trial detention center, and then from prison to prison, each step marked by a tug of war with hope as the 15-day sentence renews thrice, extends into a 45-day sentence, which also renews, a trial pending, until the verdict arrives: 15 years of incarceration.…