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)