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.

Starring Dalida, Mohsen Mohieddin, Shwikar