Movies usually treat train stations as venues for the passengers' romantic meetings and partings, but they rarely focus on the lives of people who work there. Youssef Chahine's absorbing Cairo Station is different. It swarms with indigenous life, that of the people who serve the passengers, loading their luggage or selling them newspapers and food and drink. It focuses in particular on a porter, Abu Siri (Farid Shawqi), his girlfriend, Hanuma (Hind Rustum), who peddles soft drinks, and a crippled newspaper vendor, Qinawi (Chahine). Abu Siri is something of a bully, but his chief aim, besides courting (and sometimes abusing) Hanuma, is to organize a labor union for the other luggage handlers. Hanuma doesn't have a license to ply her trade, so she and her fellow drink vendors are always scurrying to hide from the police. Qinawi is the lowest of the lowly, living in a shed that he decorates with cutout pictures of women that remind him of the object of his desires, the voluptuous Hanuma. Eventually, Qinami's desire will turn into a sinister obsession, especially as he's goaded by other men at the station who mock him for not having a woman. But the darkness of the plot of Cairo Station is not what makes it an exceptional film, it's the vivid portrait of the station, as lives work themselves out amid the never-ending movement of people and trains.
