The Sixth Day

This singularly arresting adaptation of a novel by renowned writer Andrée Chedid casts French pop star Dalida (in her final screen performance) as a married washerwoman trying to save the life of her stricken grandson in the midst of the 1947 cholera outbreak in Cairo, while simultaneously navigating the romantic advances of a charming, Gene Kelly–obsessed young organ grinder (Mohsen Mohieddin). Tragedy and comedy, reality and fantasy, melodrama and musical merge in a dreamily poetic cinematic fairy tale that stands as one of director Youssef Chahine’s most philosophically probing pictures—a meditation on the role of art in resisting despair and mortality.