Cairo station = Bab el hadid

Renowned Egyptian director Youssef Chahine established his international reputation with “Cairo Station” after it screened at the Berlin Film Festival. Focusing on a group of marginalised luggage carriers and soft-drink sellers who live in abandoned traincars, Chahine posits Cairo’s main railroad station as a microcosm of Egyptian society. A crippled newspaper dealer (played powerfully by Chahine himself), falls in love with a beautiful but indifferent lemonade seller who is engaged to the muscular and virile leader of the luggage-carriers. Swept away by his obsessive desire, the crippled man kidnaps the object of his passion, with terrible consequences. Into this story of doomed sexual obsession amongst a shadowy underclass, Chahine weaves glaring economic disparity, union activity, and other politically charged motifs. The work of Fritz Lang and the genres of film-noir and neo-realism are often cited as influences on the film. In Arabic with English subtitles.