Hailed at the time for ushering in a new era of Arabic cinema, filmmaker Youssef Chahine stars in this melodrama of poverty and sexual frustration – one that shocked Arab audiences in the 1950s. The filmmaker is remarkable 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 enduring 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 experimenting with formal and thematic elements from both Italian neo-realism and German expressionism.
Presented in association with the Arab Fringe, Liverpool Arabic Arts Festival and FACT, Liverpool.
