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)

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