Cinemateket: Cairo Station

Cairo Station is seen as the most influential Arabic film ever and is Chahine’s great breakthrough film. It is a psychological melodrama, with Chahine himself in the leading role as the newspaper salesman Qinawi, who is sexually attracted to the soda seller Hanuma. The story in its entirety plays out at a train station in Cairo, a micro cosmos mirroring the Egyptian society. The film, which competed for the Golden Bear prize at the Berlin Film Festival, clearly drew inspiration from Italian neo-realism.

The film maker Youssef Chahine (1926-2008) contributed with artistically ambitious films through six decades and is the director that made Egyptian film internationally renowned. Chahine masterly managed to mirror the Egyptian society’s enormous political and social upheavals through his films. His first film Daddy Amin premiered in 1950, and his last film Chaos in 2007. Chahine is also known as the film maker who discovered the actor Omar Sharif.