Cairo Station (Bab El-Hadid), the work of Egypt's most skilled and critically praised director, Youssef Chahine, “is a neo-realist classic, worthy of early Fellini; a drama of the lives of the people who work in the Cairo railroad station. Chahine has created a totally involving film, for, though their lives are sordid, these people are intensely alive, overflowing with feeling. Parallel incidents are tightly interwoven, characters sharply etched, tension subtly developed. A remarkable achievement for any place at any time but quite astonishing for Egypt in the 1950s.”