It’s impossible for any one film to complete define a particular country at a specific moment in time. Countries and cultures are too vast, too multiple, too varied to be quantified in 90 minutes. But a film can capture a place and time strongly enough that it becomes not only a time capsule of the past, but a window into how a place and culture might be what it is in the contemporary. Cairo Station is arguably such a film. While it was not successful in its home country when released, over the decades it has become recognized as a pillar of Egyptian cinema. Youssef Chahine’s tale of the working poor at the main railway station, their struggles, their love, their obsessions and their violence, is…
