In Cairo Station, a place of transit is turned into a stage for passion and the margins. Amid Cairo’s tumult, Chahine orchestrates the clash between dream and poverty, the fantasy of love and the brutality of the world. The station becomes a microcosm — filled with glances, noise, and obsession. By playing Kenaoui himself, a disabled newspaper seller, Chahine crafts a daring drama, poised between burning realism and inner vertigo, between bodily fever and social chaos. Cairo Station uses cinema as a space of disturbance where vital impulses expose the violence of reality and exclusion takes on a face. Beneath the roar of trains, one hears the pulse of an entire nation — that of Egypt on the threshold of modernity: uncertain, feverish, and trembling.
Jérôme Baron
Restored print
