“Chahine fans out from a sweaty, realist base towards social observation, florid melodrama and dark suspense. It’s a strikingly controlled, confident, bitingly effective display, which leaves you wondering where this film has been all our lives.”

Cairo Station (1958), directed by and starring Youssef Chahine, is a tense, noirish thriller set in the main train station of the Egyptian capital. Chahine plays Qinawi, a lame and socially awkward porter who finds himself drawn towards the fiancee of a local trade union leader. His obsession grows alongside his resentment at his treatment by the other workers and turns into homicidal madness.

It’s a surprisingly stylised film, but with a strong spine of neo-realism common from Italian movies of the 1940s and 1950s, but instead of going down the route of films such as Rome, Open City (1945) or Germany, Year Zero (1948), it picks up the lighting and the plot twists of the noir genre.  Darkness, shadows and a mesmerisingly enigmatic performance by Chahine, its the contrasting quiet moments of reflection and observation and the strikingly violent scenes that form the climax of the film that sticks in the mind.

Gritty, sweaty but thoughtfully humanistic, Cairo Station is a film that tells a small story but offers a far more sophisticated social commentary at the same time.