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 newsvendor 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, an attempt to rejuvenate formula-driven mainstream Egyptian cinema by judiciously adding formal and thematic elements from both neorealism and German expressionism.

Chahine mixes documentary and fiction to create a portrait of Egypt’s bustling capital and a major center of the Arab world. The view of Cairo that emerges is a chaotic jumble of poverty, overcrowding, opulence and surging religious intolerance that results in a kaleidoscopic image recalling silent-era “city symphonies” and Fellini’s Roma.