Cairo Station

The longtime leading light of Egyptian cinema, Youssef Chahine established his international reputation with this bombshell psychosexual shocker. The director stars as Qinawi, a simpleton newspaper hawker whose obsession with a sultry cold-drink seller (Hind Rostom, the “Marilyn Monroe of Arabia”) leads to tragedy of operatic proportions on the streets of Cairo. Blending elements of neorealism (a grim, grubby evocation of working-class life and socioeconomic struggle) with deep-dish noir-melodrama (lust, jealousy, madness, and murder), Cairo Station represented something startlingly new in Arab cinema: here was raw, populist poetry splashed across the screen with blood-and-guts savagery.