FILM000018

As shocking today as it was in 1958, Cairo station is the great Egyptian director Youssef Chahine’s masterpiece-a street-level expose of sexual obsession and working-class madness that’s as grimy and claustrophobic as its Cairo railway station setting. From its noirish opening scene, in which a scruffy newspaper hawker discovers a rag-strewn, living quarters filled with cut-out girlie pictures, it’s clear that the film has departed from the upper-class realms of typical 1950’s Arab cinema.
Chahine moves his camera as fluidly as a sleepwalker through a nightmarish world where, as luggage porters strive to unionise and all sections of society swarm along the tracks, the crippled street vendor Qinawi (played by Chahine himself) feverishly desires a brash, beautiful and utterly uninterested lemonade seller with disastrous results. Combining Italian NEOREALISM, Egyptian romanticism and overheated film noir, Cairo station was unlike anything anyone had seen on movie screens before.

1958

74 mins

Arabic,

Egypt

http://arabcinemadb.alc.manchester.ac.uk/Public/Film/Show/FILM000018

It was entered into the 8th Berlin International Film Festival.

The film was selected as the Egyptian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 31st Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee.