Cairo Station: Of Time and the City

Chahine’s visual acumen had been in evidence as early as Son of the Nile: the roving camera, the evocative framing, the dramatic interplay between foreground and background, the swift editing, and the notable emphasis on the performers’ physicality. His subsequent evolution as a filmmaker was marked by a gravitation toward bigger canvases, a more pronounced musicality in his camera movements, and an incessant interrogation of the individual’s physical and symbolic position in the environment. In Cairo Station, this signature lexicon is fully manifested, married to moving pathos and emotional nakedness.

Set entirely in and around the Cairo station, and unfolding over the course of a single hot day, the film thrusts us from the get-go into its hustle and bustle: the speeding trains, the rushing passengers, the flurry of diligent porters, the blaring announcements of arrivals and departures. Madbouli (renowned theater actor Hassan El Baroudi), the station’s newsagent, delivers the opening narration, which underscores Kenawi’s humanity.

Kenawi’s futile pursuit of Hanuma is the heart of a compact narrative written with remarkable precision and wit. A subplot revolving around the efforts of Hanuma’s fiancé, Abu Serih (Farid Shawki), to form a porters’ union adds an explicitly political layer to a picture that seamlessly blends melodrama with elements of social realism, noir, and psychological thriller into a polyphonic yet cohesive whole.

Myriad characters come and go in what transpires as a colorful panorama of postrevolutionary Egypt. There’s the enigmatic middle-class girl waiting to say goodbye to her upper-class lover, who is traveling abroad; the feminist leader (versatile supporting actress Naima Wasfi) campaigning against marriage while holding a copy of I Am Free (Ana horra), Ihsan Abdel Quddous’s pathbreaking 1954 feminist novel; the jealous farmer (Abdel Ghani El Nagdi) who clobbers Kenawi when his wife accuses him of flirting; the ultrareligious men sneering at a jaunty swing band; the two young men scavenging for women to pick up.

Glimpses of everyday life in Cairo are scattered across the picture: the billboard ads; the refurbished 1920s European neoclassical architecture of downtown; the run-down buildings overlooking the railway tracks. Augmenting these visual signposts of a rapidly modernizing Cairo are contrasts between characters, exemplifying the city’s contradictions: Hanuma’s hawking of soft drinks, a capitalist export, compared with Abu Serih’s socialist push for unionization; the repressiveness of the religious men versus the carefreeness of the swing band; the staunch resolve of the feminist leader in relation to the casual brutality toward women of both the farmer and Abu Serih.

Kenawi, on the other hand, represents the lurking, suppressed violence of a disadvantaged class of men prohibited from existing in a society with a perpetually restrictive view of sex and masculinity. He is referred to as “the kid,” in comparison to “the man” Abu Serih; it is this perceived weakness that audiences likely found most abhorrent.

Kenawi is not the sole onlooker in the film: everyone at the station looks at and eavesdrops on one another. Abu Serih maintains a watchful eye on Hanuma while constantly observing the passengers; Madbouli watches Kenawi; Abu Gaber (Abdel Aziz Khalil), Abu Serih’s work rival, watches him; the religious men watch the spirited swing band; the farmer watches his wife; and the girl watches for the mirage of her absent lover.

Before the transformative changes of the eighties—when Islamization, rising poverty, and the degradation of culture forever altered how we saw our country and ourselves—Egyptians had turned to cinema for a reassuringly idealized image of the nation. We bought into the myth of the harmonious, multicultural Cairo, we believed in the stirring romances of Omar Sharif and the possibility of eternal love, and like Chahine—at least at first—we trusted the 1952 revolution to build a free, prosperous Egypt. Cairo Station challenged all of this.

Film stars were an indispensable part of the myth, and Cairo Station upended that too. At the time of its release, Hind Rostom was already the poster girl of Egyptian cinema thanks to the trio of films she had made with Hassan el-Imam, celebrated for his sensational feminist melodramas. Rostom wasn’t Egyptian cinema’s first sex symbol. The ravishing Camelia (1929–50) had previously brought overt sexuality to the screen. But Rostom had more gravitas and range—including brilliant comic timing. In Cairo Station, she infuses Hanuma with a conflicting set of attributes that makes her difficult to pin down. Hanuma is mean yet empathic, fiercely independent yet sexually submissive, faithful yet unabashedly coquettish, vivacious yet cynical, ambitious yet pragmatic about the life she can have.

Shawki was similarly a massive box-office draw—the biggest action star of the fifties. He habitually gave his hard-bitten leading men a dash of vulnerability and levity. But the character of Abu Serih was a different beast: a man with a noble cause undermined by grave insecurities, self-deception, and a predilection for violence. Abu Serih is a man struggling to do the right thing, saddled with the responsibility of becoming the masculine ideal he’s expected to be.

Unlike Rostom and Shawki, Chahine was free from this baggage of association. Scrawny, diminutive, and grubby-looking, his Kenawi is constantly dwarfed by the world of the station. Chahine brings spades of soulfulness and naturalism to a character who is estranged not only from his surroundings but also from himself.

In 1958, audiences initially flocked to see the latest Farid Shawki actioner only to be confronted with an untraditional hero who is denied redemption. Viewers were confused by Rostom’s Hanuma, utterly disdainful of Shawki’s Abu Serih, and resentful of the film’s grim ending. Cairo Station was one of the biggest failures in all of Egyptian cinema.

But Chahine quickly picked himself up to direct Jamila, the Algerian, a biopic of the Algerian-nationalist militant Djamila Bouhired that was released later in 1958. His trust in the Egyptian president persevered in the coming years, culminating with the Nasser allegory Saladin the Victorious (1963). The growing corruption brought about by Nasser’s nationalization of cinema forced Chahine to reside temporarily in Lebanon, from 1965 to 1969, and by the early seventies his belief in the revolution had evaporated. In the next decade, as Egyptian cinema began to collapse amid government apathy and the destructive impact of home video, Chahine turned to France to fund his work, which enabled him to attain his long-sought-after independence.

Cairo would also change beyond recognition: by the time Chahine delivered his contentious French-financed short Cairo as Seen by Chahine (1991), the disfigured capital had become a mere shadow of its former self. In 2025, Cairo is once again being reshaped, this time by a grand gentrification ushered in by yet another authoritarian leader brought about by another revolution. The statue of Ramses II no longer adorns the Cairo station, after being transferred to the Grand Egyptian Museum. The gap between the haves and have-nots has exponentially grown. Censorship has hardened over the past decade, surpassing the sternest of the Nasser years. Acute social changes and a political climate hostile toward critical art have eliminated any chance of films like Cairo Station being made.

Today, Cairo Station stands not only as one of Chahine’s most daring, most perfect masterworks but as a memento mori of a vanished city, of a lost time when independent, nonconformist art was still possible. Cairo Station was a miracle of its time—a miracle that may never be replicated.