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How did cinema shape the way people navigated—and imagined—the city of Cairo? How did urban space, colonial modernity, and mass media come together to produce new ways of seeing, working, and dreaming in the Egyptian capital?

Walking in Cinematic Cairo is a three-part event series that explores the entangled histories of cinema, urban infrastructure, and everyday life in Egypt’s capital in the early 20th century. Through film, archival material, and critical discussion, we trace how cinema functioned not only as entertainment but also as a mirror of urban life, a site of political struggle, and a tool of cultural transformation.

• Film Discussion: Cairo Station by Youssef Chahine (July 5)Dive into Chahine’s 1958 masterpiece, Cairo Station, a film that transforms the city’s central train terminal into a cinematic microcosm of post-revolutionary Egypt. Together, we’ll unpack how class, gender, labor, and mobility intersect in this iconic film and urban site. Participants are encouraged to view the film beforehand.
• Talk: When Old Cinema Was New: Media and Leisure in Colonial Egypt (July 12)Karim Elhaies takes us back to the early decades of cinema in Egypt to examine how cinema was entangled with the rise of modern infrastructure and political imagination. From electrical grids to urban planning, cinema’s arrival marked a profound transformation in how Egyptians experienced leisure, modernity, and the colonial city.
• Workshop: Walking through Cairo’s Early Cinematic Archive (July 19) This hands-on workshop offers a close reading of Cairo’s early 20th-century entertainment landscape through maps, ads, newspapers, and cinema ephemera. We’ll explore how film emerged alongside theaters, cabarets, and tramlines, reshaping public life and urban pleasures in a rapidly changing city.

Join us as we walk through Cairo’s cinematic past—one frame, fragment, and footprint at a time.

The series is convened by Karim el-Haies.

Karim Elhaies is a PhD candidate in Cinema Studies at New York University and co-founder of IDCtheory and Algarabia Language Coop. He holds an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from Columbia University. His dissertation studies the history, politics, and aesthetics of Egyptian Cinema with a special focus on the relationship between old and new genres and waves of filmmaking.