- Before receiving a UK cinema certificate in 1973 the film was extensively cut by around 30 minutes by the BBFC with heavy edits to rape scenes, footage of sexual experiments, graphic violence, the fantasy murder sequence, and the opening scenes on the slave ship.
- The directors' cut of Addio Zio Tom draws parallels between the horrors of slavery and the rise of the Black Power Movement, represented by Eldridge Cleaver, LeRoi Jones, Stokely Carmichael, and a few others. The film ends with an unidentified man's fantasy re-enactment of William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner. American distributors felt that such scenes were too incendiary, and forced Jacopetti and Prosperi to remove more than thirteen minutes of footage explicitly concerned with racial politics for American and other Anglophone audiences.
- The movie was originally released in Italy in a 123-minute version and immediately withdrawn when the directors were sued for plagiarism by writer Joseph Chamberlain Furnas. It was re-released in March 1972 in a re-cut 135-minute version under the title 'Zio Tom.'
- When the film first opened in the US on October 27, 1972, New York newspapers listed the running time as 100 minutes. When it belatedly appeared in Los Angeles on May 9, 1973, the running time was listed as 97 minutes, suggesting further cutting.
- The 135-minute version (available only in Italian) now available on DVD is very different from the American version. It has 14 mins of new footage, including a new introduction which shows the reaction of African Americans to the death of Martin Luther King Jr. The new film is edited so that the timeline also continually shifts back and forth from the past to the present. Also much of the most disturbing footage was cut out.
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