
Cairo Station / Bab El Hadid
- Release Date: 1958
- Type: Featured
- Run time: 77 Minutes
- Directed by: Youssef Chahine
- Produced by: Gabriel Telhamy
- Screenplay: Abd El Hay Adib
- Cast: Farid Shawki, Hind Rostom, Youssef Chahine, Hassan El Baroudi, AbdelAziz Khalil, Neama Wasfi
- Cinematography: Alvise Orfanelli
- Art direction: Abbas Helmy
- Editing: Kamal Abou El-Ela
- Music: Fouad El-Zahery
- Sound: Aziz Fadel
- Subtitles: English, French
Synopsis:
"Chahine himself stars in this melodrama of poverty and sexual frustration that shocked Arab audiences in the 1950s. The filmmaker is remarkably effective as a crippled news vendor who lives alone in a squalid, pinup-lined shack and whose obsession with a beautiful young lemonade stand vendor leads inevitably towards violence. One of the decisive turning points in Chahine’s long career, Cairo Station marked a new visual daring and embrace of ambitious and controversial subject matter. The film is an attempt to rejuvenate a formula-driven mainstream Egyptian cinema by judiciously adding formal and thematic elements from both neo-realism and German expressionism." (Harvard Film Archive)