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Description:
In this beautiful classic film from legendary director Youssef Chahine, Cairo’s main railroad station is used to represent all of Egyptian society. We see a community comprised of luggage carriers and soft-drink vendors living in abandoned train cars.
A crippled newspaper dealer, Kinawi (played by Chahine himself), falls in love with the beautiful but indifferent Hanuma (Hind Rostom), a lemonade seller who only has eyes for the handsome Abu Sri’. Swept away by his obsessive desire, Kinawi kidnaps the object of his passion, with terrible consequences.
Chahine received international recognition when this masterpiece of sexuality, repression, madness and violence among society’s marginalized played at the Berlin Film Festival, where it was nominated for a Golden Bear in 1958.
Trailer:
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Reviews:
“A blend of sensuality and film noir, set against a backdrop of lower-depths neorealism, Cairo Station is essentially an underclass psycho-thriller. The director himself portrays a crippled newspaper vendor whose passion for a slinky soft-drink peddler decays into homicidal mania. (He’s Tod Browning to his own Lon Chaney.) The Chahine of Cairo Station is a world-class engineer of expressionistic gothic shadow effects whose restless camera seems to peer into the souls of his fevered characters.”
–David Chute, L.A. Weekly
“Reportedly (and understandably) Youssef Chahine’s most popular film among Egyptians, this gritty and relatively early (1958) black-and-white masterpiece also features his most impressive acting turn, as a crippled news vendor working at the title railroad station. The adroit interweaving of various miniplots around the station is matched by a heady mix of moods and genres: At various junctures this movie becomes a musical, a slasher film, a neorealist drama, a comedy, and a horror film – come to think of it, it’s pretty noir as well.”
–Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
